Are you ready?
by Agapanto Blu
Summary: *Kuroko cried non-stop for the next three days, with his hand firmly holding on his slightly rounded belly, but he didn't waver on his decision. Akashi didn't re-call.* Pairings: AKAKURO - MayuMibu - MidoTaka - AoKise - AlexMomo. (WARNING: M-Preg! and GenderBender!Character -not Fem!Character, the gender change takes place within the plot-, don't like don't read.)
1. Prologue

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

* * *

 _ **Prologue**_

* * *

" _Are you ready?"_

" _S-Sei-kun…"_

" _Hush, be quiet, Tetsuya…" Akashi's low, thin, laughter in his ear is like the first of a child: ringing like silver and fresh like lemonade ice. It's sweet and tickles while his hands take care of his sides almost as gently. "You don't want the others to hear us, do you?"_

" _If Sei-kun wasn't a pervert, there would be no problem." the phantom mutters, averting his gaze to hide that little blushing that escaped his control to bloom on his cheeks like poppies in a field, "Waiting to come back home was too much for His Majesty."_

" _I'll oversee this attitude of yours only because I must admit you're right." But Akashi keeps on laughing and his threat isn't much worthy, especially with his nose-tip brushing against the teal-head's earlobe. "However, I beg you to try to understand me, Tetsuya. It is almost two weeks we're here, alone, in a wood on the mountains, with a sweaty and panting you passing continuously in front of me and…"_

" _We're not alone, Sei-kun." Kuroko reminds him, but turning his head to make their noses touch, "Both our teams are here. And this is a training camp, it's pretty normal for me to be sweaty and panting."_

" _Irrelevant." Akashi shrugs, raising a bit from his position on all four above Tetsuya to admire the other, laying on his futon. Kagami took the hint and vanished in order to not meet their effusions so, at least for this night, they have the room just for them. And after ten days of chastity and five still ahead of him, Seijuro is determined to treasure those hours. "You have to take responsibilities."_

 _Kuroko pouts, offended, and the red-head smiles because he knows he's the only one the teal-head is so open with, the only one the phantom shows so many emotions to._

 _They kiss. At first slowly, carefully, with Seijuro's hand brushing tenderly Tetsuya's cheek and nothing more, but then the phantom wrapped his arms around the red-head's neck and their tongues become bolder, the heat rises, the bodies sweat, until when, breathless, Akashi pulls back to move his mouth to his lover's ear._

" _I have a request…" he murmures._

 _Tetsuya only knows in this moment he would give him the moon even, if only his boyfriend asked for it._

Kuroko moaned, shaking his head to chase away that memory from his mind. Guilt trip and fear were pulsing in his chest, stronger and harsher for every second of that night he remembered and every moaned he had let out was like a lash on bare skin, humiliating and painful.

The phone in his hand vibrated again – Kagami, for the third time –, but Kuroko ignored it again and resumed his walking back and forth in the car park of the little mountain lodge where Seirin and Rakuzan were having their conjunct winter training camp. He nervously checked at the road, but still nothing and so he peeked at his mobile only to spot the digital clock pushing the numbers a digit forward, a meter lower in the ravine. Tetsuya knew that precision didn't matter when it came to some things, that it could have been already too late as likely as missing a whole lifespan of time, but his head needed to hold onto something or he would have gone crazy.

He couldn't believe he had done what he had done, he had consented to Akashi so foolishly, arrogant in his certain of being able to fix everything later. He felt tears trying to reach his eyes because of anxiousness and fear, but his five years with the mask of a ghost allowed his to restrain them.

How came he was so imbecile?!

He moaned again, without clue of what he should do to stop, and looked around again. There were already forty-five digits too much.

If only he hadn't slept so much, if he had thought before saying 'yes', if only there were a damn _real_ pharmacy and not just a store with a limited inventory!

He let himself fell on the small wall of the car-park and took his head in the hands while his phone vibrated again, this time for a text from the coach which forced him, lightening the screen, to see another sand grain falling on the wrong side of his clepsydra.

What to do?! A part of him wanted to call Akashi and tell him everything, but his mind was screaming that Seijuro had really no faults in that story. It was only him who chose to keep that secret of his life when they got together for the first time in middle school, and then not to tell him even when they got in high school, despite their relationship being two-years long then; the red-head didn't deserve to be dragged into it because of him being a stupid.

" _Kami-sama, please…_ " slipped past his lips before he could stop himself, " _Please…!_ "

His voice, broken by a barely kept sob, had been reduced to such a low whisper that he could hear the car approaching at least fifteen seconds before this one entered the park lot and his body, instinctively, jumped on its feet.

When the figure of his mother's car appeared, Kuroko felt a childish relief spreading in his chest, as if the woman's only presence could fix everything. He held the cell-phone in his hand so tightly that his knuckles whitened and he prayed that those forty-six minutes weren't enough, that he was hurting himself for nothing, that everything would go back in its place.

But as soon as the tall and slim, like bamboo, figure of Sakura Kuroko exited the vehicle, Kuroko felt only the weight of those minutes crushing him yelling all together in his mind the same sentence.

"It's too late…" he murmured, without knowing why he was repeating it but keeping on saying again and again until when his mother was in front of him and had him in her embrace, "It's too late…"

* * *

Sakura had long azure hair, like his son's, and his same big cornflower-coloured eyes; the same pale skin over light feminine traits, but she had a little fleshier red lips and she was tall, outstretched toward the sky she seemed to have stolen her colours from. He face, beautiful like a porcelain doll's, was rigid in a worried expression while she held in her hands three subtle with little tubes, and yet was still caring and gentle. That absolute devotion made Tetsuya even more ashamed.

"I'm sorry…" he found himself sobbing, sat with his knees to his chest, on the commune bathroom floor, suddenly unable to keep himself from crying, "I'm sorry!"

Sakura knelt in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders, looking for his eyes with hers and trying to cover her own anxiousness.

"Hush, Tetsuya, calm down, please…" she murmured, with a low but firm voice, "Listen to me, Tecchan, please." The hold of her hands on him was kind, but Kuroko felt it boiling-out, as if it was trying to melt his skin on the bones. "Listen, hermaphrodites rarely are fertile; the pill was just…a precaution, okay? And so was the pill of the day after. They were all plus, to be sure, but if you didn't…if you didn't take them it doesn't mean anything, understood? Don't worry…"

But the tears on Tetsuya's face didn't stop falling; they simply change their path a bit when he shook his head violently.

"Mom…" he sobbed that name like a pray, a plead so desperate that it break something within Sakura. "I…I can _feel_ it, mom…" It was crazy, it didn't make sense, how could he know? Tetsuya had no idea but it was there, in the right centre of his own being, like a light point in the middle of an eternal darkness, and it pulsed and made everything spinning around itself and…God, how could he explain it, when he was the first one to not comprehend?! "I know it is crazy, but…" he tried to say, but the alarm of his mother's phone made him jerk and strangled the words within his throat like a dog's whimper.

Sakura knew what his son was trying to say, but hurried up in checking the tests without helping him to explain.

The results before her eyes were all unanimous, but she would have sold an arm for it to be different.

Damn, Tetsuya just turned eighteen three days ago! Seijuro barely reached his seventeen the previous month!

She closed her eyes for a moment, but then she turned to his son and that terrified gaze, lost, so hurt and humiliated, forced her to grab that body still so frail and held it to her chest as if it was a child's. Even if, sadly enough, he was not a child anymore.

Kuroko was going to ask for an answer, when his mother's words slipped in his ears.

"It is not crazy, Tecchan…" she was murmuring and, even without seeing, he can _feel_ the tears in her voice, "It's just…that there are things a mother simply knows."

Tetsuya closed his eyes while those words broke him, melted him in strong loud sobs like maybe only a five-year-old child, pushed him to hide his face against his mother's breast and hold her shirt so strongly he thought he would leave a hole.

 _What should I do?!_

He kept on crying for hours, unable to find an answer.

* * *

 _I'm not ready._

* * *

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 ** _Authoress' notes:_**

 _Okay... Ehilà!_ _Yes, it's me again -.-_

 _Here's a new fic that, don't worry, it's already complete ;) I began posting it on Tumblr ( agapantoblu . tumblr . com ), but forgot posting it here, eheh ^^" Thus, here the first FOUR chapters, the remnant three will be posted weekly on Sundays, as for on the blog._

 _As you probably read in the introduction, this will be a particular story, with a Transgender!Character and a Male!Pregnancy, so if you don't like stop here, please._

 _For all the others...have a nice reading ;)_

 _See you!_

 _ **A**_ _gap_


	2. Chapter I

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

* * *

 _ **Chapter I**_

* * *

"Are you ready?"

Sakura's subtle voice seemed to take the wrong note in the absolute silence of the empty mountain lodge. Kuroko took a deep breath, adjusted the shoulder-belt of his sack and took _again_ a deep breath. He let his eyes wandering over the room, but without really seeing it, then he slowly moved his hand over his belly, failing to notice how much it was trembling.

In the end, he turned toward his mother, on the doorstep, and nodded with a strange knot in his throat, too voiceless to answer by words.

* * *

Due to medical reasons, a few weeks before the end of his third year of high school, Kuroko Tetsuya had to leave the conjunct training camp of his and Rakuzan's basketball team to come back to Tokyo. Four days after, however, when the other guys returned too, he was at the bus stop waiting for them.

Over his face, had fallen again his thickest and most impenetrable mask.

* * *

" _Tetsuya, I don't know…_ "

"I'll be alright, Sei-kun, please, don't worry." Kuroko shook his head, even knowing that his boyfriend couldn't see him.

The room around him was neither big nor small, with walls of a bright white and dark parquet floors. The black and white jersey, with the bright red number eleven, was hanging lazily from his spot on the top corner of the wooden closet door and was looking in religious silence at the used futon in front of it. It was almost midday, but Kuroko hadn't get up since three days; he turned and rolled within the sheets, now looking at the wall and nor at the sky outside the window his feet were facing, chasing after lines and lines of thoughts with no head nor end, unable to give them a sense or at least a reason. He had made his fingertips run on the pillow surface pretending it was Akashi's face, cried against the cushion cover imaging it was his lover's large and welcoming chest, but now that he could talk with the real Seijuro instead of a silent hassock he was doing nothing but lying.

" _It's not about worrying or not, Tetsuya._ " the red-head immediately answered back, stubborn as always, " _I don't like the idea of leaving you alone in this moment. Maybe I should really postpone the departure: even if I lose the first lessons, it's nothing I can't catch up with by studying on my own and…_ "

"Sei-kun, please, do not say foolish things." Kuroko's teal eyes slipped outside the glass to mirror themselves in the very sky, "My mother will heal soon, doctors say it was just a case of anemia and that with a bit of time and cures she'll come back completely. It doesn't make sense for you to delay your departure and lose the first days of college just because of me."

" _If my bofriend's mother's ill, it is my duty to stay by his side, Tetsuya._ "

"And if my boyfriend wants to act stupidly, it is my duty to stop him, Seijuro." Kuroko sighed, made soft in spite of himself by the gentle protection Akashi was giving him continuously, but then he resumed playing with the edge of the blanket he had forced himself to at least _sit_ on and gave his all attention back to the phone near his ear, "Sei-kun, listen, you're already at the airport and your flight leaves within thirty minutes, you can't back off now. Go, really, I'll be fine."

Akashi's sigh on the other side of the call made him roll his eyes.

" _Well then, but promise me you'll join me soon._ "

Kuroko gulped, but with difficulty.

"I promise you" His eyes raised and met the silent and gentle ones of his mother, on the doorframe of his room, "I'll come to New York as soon as I can." He didn't say it was never going to happen.

" _This is my boy._ " Seijuro murmured and Tetsuya could picture him smiling, with his fiery red hair illuminated by the sun light passing through the airport windows, handsome as he observed the airport runway as if he owned it, with his biker-style leather jacket Kuroko in person had given him for his seventeenth birthday and with his scarlet eyes shining and tempting, " _Don't take it the wrong way, I don't want to pressure you about leaving your mother, but I really look forward to live with you. I'm sure you'll be an amazing wife…_ "

"Sei-kun!" Kuroko scolded, with not so convincingly. Something got blocked in his throat at his first evasive answer to his boyfriend and was growing and growing every time he mentioned that carefully programmed and so long awaited future which was already out of reach, even if Akashi didn't know yet, "Go, it must me almost time for the embarking."

" _Yes, to be honest they already called once, it'd be better for me to hurry. I'll call you as soon as we land._ "

"Yes, please, don't make me worry." He couldn't have taken that too.

" _Promised. I love you, Tetsuya._ "

And Kuroko closed his eyes, loosened the pressure of his sobs so to let the silent tears fall down his cheeks and slowly, instinctively, brought his left hand to his flat belly, caressing it.

"I love you too, Seijuro." he murmured.

But inside him, inside _his body_ , there was already someone he loved even more.

* * *

A call per day wasn't much, but with Kuroko's mother still ill Akashi was determined not to burden his lover because of that forced distance. So he kept quiet and accepter, like an humble postulant, that water Tetsuya let fall from his hands.

The water grew always fewer, always slower, always thinner. It became a thread, then drops, then a single tear so rare it made Seijuro feel like a thirsty man in the middle of the desert.

In the end, came drought.

* * *

"… _Tetsuya, I fear I didn't quite catch that._ "

"You understood perfectly. Please, do not make this even more difficult."

" _No, wait. I don't want to talk about this through cellphones. I'm taking the first airplane to Japan and when I'll be there…_

"I don't want you to come back here. You have college to take care of, you're in the middle of your semester, it would be foolish to leave now."

" _What the fuck do you think I give about college, Tetsuya?!_ " Kuroko didn't jerk, even if it was absolutely the first time he heard Akashi yelling at him, moreover with such foul words. " _Tetsuya, forgive me, please… It's just…I don't… Tetsuya, you can't really mean to break up with me, can you? After all that happened and what was there between us, after five years together, I can't believe you changed your mind like this, in just three months._ "

"I'm sorry." Those were the only two honest words Tetsuya had said since the very beginning of that talk and he bitterly smiled thinking about how they would get lost within the chaos of lies far bigger and more painful. "I didn't want for it to happen, but I really fell in love with the girl in the hospital with my mom. I can't explain it, it happened all of a sudden. I know we made plans and everything, but…I don't want to do it anymore." Why did he lie and the lies hurt him maybe even more than Seijuro? Kuroko closed his eyes and thought about all the things he wished from the bottom of his heart to do. Then he added a negation. "I don't want to come to New York, I don't want to live with you and I don't want to be with you. Forgive me, please, I was not my intention to hurt you, but I can't help it."

" _Tetsuya…_ "

" **Please**." And Kuroko knew the pleas in those two words was too strong for Seijuro to ignore it, too desperate for him to instist, and simply too true for him to not let him go like he was asking for.

The following silence was heavy and violent, like the one following a slap right in the face, but Tetsuya wouldn't have been able to say who was the victim and who was the executioner. In the end, maybe, they were both the former and there was not a latter.

" _Tetsuya…_ "

"Sayonara," he murmured, before hanging up, " **Akashi-kun.** "

Kuroko cried non-stop for the next three days, with his hand firmly holding on his slightly rounded belly, but he didn't waver on his decision.

Akashi didn't re-call.

* * *

Tetsuya couldn't stand nauseas. He hated feeling the acid burning him from inside, the boiling feeling at the back of his troath, the feeling of helplessness of his body contorting in spasms he didn't have the strength to control. He hated them because he felt weak and frail; because it was ten nights already he couldn't sleep well, because he felt tired and because he couldn't stop crying, not even when he began with no reason whatsoever. Within his mind, he cursed them while kneeling on the ceramic withe tiles of the bathroom, with his head dangling over the WC and his body trembling and jerking and trying to resist even if at its limit.

Then, however, his father made him bring the hands to his full belly, he kept them there and kissed his forehead reassuring him that everything would have been alright and all of a sudden he was no weak nor tired nor dirty anymore.

Closing his eyes, he could see the light point within him growing, slowly but inexorably, and his body found itself even more helpless than against the sickness when in front of the smile that overbearingly lifted his mouth corners. Immediately, Tetsuya knew he could do it.

The next morning he would have been again in the same state, but as long as his father was there to bring his hands again to his womb everything would go smoothly.

* * *

It took other three months for Akashi to start looking for a roommate to share with the house he had bought for himself and Kuroko.

It was a _pretty small_ apartment for two people, with a kitchen, a livingroom and two bedrooms because he and Tetsuya had thought about using the second one to host the friends visiting him from Japan. It was a _too big_ apartment for an only guy.

Answering the announcement was another Japanese-American boy with black hair and a big smile, friendly and kind and conscious enough of his mother culture to avoid too much contacts with Seijuro and to show him an education the red-head had stopped hoping for since his arrival in the States. He was probably the best choice he could find.

"Koji-kun, I'm sorry. The agency just called to say they already signed a contract with another person; I didn't know. Sorry again."

Koji didn't mind it. With his smile still on his lips, he exited the house greeting Seijuro with a small bow Akashi replied to feeling just vaguely guilty for the lie he just said.

One month later, the red-head sold the house and moved to the college dorm. Single room.

* * *

"It looks like you have a basketball under your shirt."

Momoi was the first to hit Aomine's nape when he broke the heavy silence that had fallen within Kuroko's living room, but Midorima followed right after.

The navy-head was sitting on the floor, between the pink-head girl and the green-head boy, and in front of them, over a short table, there was Tetsuya's effectively deformed body. Kagam sat to the teal-head's right, between Kise and Murasakibara, while to his left were Takao, Kiyoshi and Hyuuga. Himuro was on his feet laying against the wall behind Aomine and to his side was Mitobe, but the one absolutely closed to the phantom was Aida Riko. The coach had been to only one who – after leading the whole badly-composed group to Kuroko's house to find out what was happening to their friend – had the courage to sit right beside the pregnant male after discovering his clear situation.

Tetsuya let his fingers slip slowly over the tense surface of his belly, covered by the huge shapeless sweater that was his father's and reached the middle of his tights, and in the meanwhile nodded.

"But basketballs don't kick, Aomine-kun." he apathetically replied.

Riko and Momoi tried a chuckle, but Sakura bringing tea for the guests interrupted the talk. Only when the woman had vanished within the kitchen, Midorima found the resolve to ask, in a low voice, adjusting the glasses on his nose-tip.

"Are they Akashi's?"

Kuroko was starting to wonder when that question would have come, but he guessed 'how come you're pregnant?!' was a bit more pressing inquiry.

"He doesn't know." he immediately answered, deadly serious while meeting his ex-teammate's emerald irises, "And he must never know."

"What?!" Kagami's exclamation was burked by a nudge in his stomach directly from Kise, but even Takao didn't manage to hold back, even being calmer than the red-head.

"Tecchan, but are you sure?!" he asked, shocked. In spite of them, the difference and reciprocal respect brought him and the phantom closer during the almost three years of high school just finished, "If they're his child, maybe you should…"

"Akashi-kun has a perfect life and a brilliant career waiting for him." Kuroko murmured, lowering his head, "The last thing he deserved is for me to ruin everything." Momoi tried to intervene, but Tetsuya anticipated her. "He has not even reached eighteen yet. His father would kill him, if he ever come to know…"

There was a tense silence at the mention of Akashi Seito, the man everyone remember seeing at the Winter Cup closing ceremony, when he slapped his son in front of everybody for reaching only second place.

"Neh, Kuro-chin, but what will you do?"

Kuroko raised his head toward Murasakibara with no hints of hesitation.

"I'll keep the child." he answered, "Alone."

He has still to know how little alone he would have been allowed to be from then on.

* * *

Akashi was the best of the whole college. He was far above everybody in marks and a lot of his older senpais would have sold their souls to have his smartness; the basketball team coach begged for him to join them on alternate weeks, but he always refused.

He got up, studied and went back to bed interspersing those actions with minimal and to him tasteless meals. Nobody ever saw him doing anything more.

It was like an empty body going on just by inertia.

* * *

A month more passed and Kuroko began countdown-ing those last thirty days dividing him from his child's birth.

Every morning he woke up with someone different in his living room, had lunch with someone else and ended up finding again someone else preparing him dinner. With the Miracles, the assistant-Miracles – that was how he decided to call Momoi, Takao, Himuro and Kagami – and those few ex-senpais from Seirin who knew about his particular situation, his house was always invaded and his privacy almost non-existing, but it was okay. Midorima even dragged his father to check him up, under the very strict oath of absolute silence.

It was right with the green-head guy – while they had lunch together with two bowls of white rice, because a certain child seemed determined not to accept anything else, and his parents were talking with Shintarou's father in the kitchen – that the count reached 'still-twenty-eight' and his water broke.

The only thing the boy realized with certainty was that he let the bowl fall on the floor and began shouting like never before.

* * *

It wasn't really different from an animal's, Kuroko's breath. It was the same of pureblood horse desperately running on a circuit or in lowland. Fast and heavy, labored, continuous, it came out of his nostrils with the strength of bellows because the phantom's lips were closed in a vague attempt to hold back the screams sounding muffled in his throat. Lying on his back, on a sheet placed at best under him, Tetsuya was turning left and right, but paid attention not to writhe to avoid hurting the baby and increase the contractions.

The pain was atrocious, like he's never experienced before. Inside his belly, something was moving and fidgeting, _digging in his flesh_ , opening him in two, breaking him, lacerating him, it was all red, all red, all red, it hurt and hurt and hurt, it hurt, it hurt!

Through the tears fog, he looked with his eyes for his parents' figures, the azure stain of his mother's hair and the black one of his father, but found only the green scribble of one of the Midorima's hair. It took a moment for him to realize someone was calling him, then he blinked and in the end Shintarou's glasses rigid framework appeared clean.

He opened his lips, to ask, but that steel sphere in his womb began kicking even harder, downward, and dilating his belly even more. A scream was everything his mouth let out.

"Tecchan!" Sakura, knelt to his right, bended toward his face and place an hand on his forehead, but Tetsuya didn't seem to be able to hear her while he arched his back and grabbed the sheets with both of his hands, "Midorima-sensei!"

Midorima Aiato, Shintarou's father, bit his tongue, but forced open the knees of the boy in front of him. He was neither an obstetric nor a pediatrician, but even a whitewasher would have been able to tell there was too much _blood._ Ignoring the pleas from the woman and giving his best not to listen to the boy's desperate moans, he obliged Kuroko the father and Midorima the son to hold still his patient's open legs and to keep his shoulders on the floor to avoid sudden movements, then he stretched to touch the belly. To his first minimal pressure the blood flow increased.

"It's too tight!" he growled, tearing a shred of the sheet to stanch the different liquids and try to take a better look, "Towels!"

"What's happening?!" Kuroko Haru exclaimed, while Sakura ran to grab the necessary, "What's too tight?!"

"Everything!" Aiato had his forehead pearled with sweat and his shirt sleeves while he was rolling them were stained in red, "The placenta, the channel, the opening… Even Tetsuya's belly wasn't elastic enough, not like a woman's, and it didn't manage to enlarge enough for the growing fetus. Damn, this must be why the labour got so much anticipated…!"

"What does this mean?!" Sakura exclaimed, shocked, while passing the towels to the doctor.

The man didn't answer her. His emerald eyes ran to the thin face of someone who was a little more than a child himself in his hands. Pale, like never before, and sweaty and panting, he had both his eyes and lips sealed while silent tears ran down his cheeks and sometimes escaped sobs made him jerk and tremble. In his mind, two different opposite scenarios were fighting within themselves, but Aiato knew the final choice was that frail guy's only.

"Tetsuya, can you hear me?!" he called, bending over him, "Can you understand what's happening?!"

Kuroko threw his head backward, a moan escaped his suddenly opened lips, but in the middle of the gesture, with his back arched, that sound took a feeble and trembling sense. It was on of the most suffering "No…" Midorima had ever heard.

"Listen to me, Tetsuya, it's important!" he tried to say calmly, stretching to put an hand over the boy's cheek and call his attention, even if while holding still the towels with the other. A pair of blue hallucinated and teary eyes with red sclera focused hesitantly on him. "The baby can't get out, do you understand? They're…they're tearing you in two trying to open a passage and it can't end well for any of you two this way." Kuroko's eyes grew bigger, huge, for fear and Aiato saw him trying to sit up, but luckily Sintarou and Haru managed to keep him down. "Listen!" he tried to catch again his attention by grabbing his chin, but all of a sudden that frail boy had found a superhuman strength and an absolute determination to react against what he had just being told. "Tetsuya, listen to me! I'm giving you two possibilities, but you're the one to choose, okay? I need you to do it _quickly_ , got it?!"

Kuroko was panting, the heart in his chest was beating a thousand times per second and in between the red stormed-sea waves fogging his brain with pain the few rational thoughts he could master were breaking him even more than the child in his belly.

 _He can't get out… He can't get out, he can't get out! He can't get out, why are you all still doing nothing?!_ , his mind was an erupting volcano, there were fire and flames and destruction and he couldn't understand. Into his throat existed only screams and he couldn't find a way to pronounce even just a single sentence. Two options, Midorima-san said. Which ones?!

Aiato saw in Tetsuya's eyes the very second the teal-head realized completely his words and came back to lucidity enough to understand so he immediately took advantage of it. The towel in his hands, soaking wet, was substituted with another.

"Tetsuya, we need to pull the baby out, one way or another, before your wounds get too serious and the both of you die, you bloodless and him strangled within your belly." he said, deadly serious, "We called the ambulance, but there's been a car accident and at this rate they won't make it in time so we need to do something _now_." he gulped, "The possibilities are these. I can try to perform an emergency caesarean and pull the baby out; I have what I need, but they're too early so I'll have to keep him attached to the umbilical cord until the arrival of the ambulance with an incubator and this means I don't know if and when I'll be able to sew _you_ up." A different moan, suffering but more guttural, came out of Kuroko at those words, but Midorima kept on, "The other choice is that I give you the priority, performed a chirurgical incision to take the baby out and cut the cord hoping for the ambulance to come in time to save him too. I need to know what you want me to do, because if we wait more it will be too late for both."

Kuroko widened his eyes and his mouth fell immediately opened, uncaring of the screams in his throat. What damn kind of questions were them?!, wasn't it obvious, his choice?! Only yells came out of his lips and his back arched again when something _ripped_ even more within him, causing a spasm to his forcibly blocked legs.

He was screaming his lungs dry, when Shintarou's familiar face appeared before him. He had a pale and sweaty visage, the big eyes showing all the fear he was instead trying to hide under a serious mask, his glasses fallen to his tip-nose, but he was the closest thing to Akashi Tetsuya had and he felt grateful, in spite of himself, for the shooter to be there.

"Kuroko, concentrate." this one ordered in that right moment, leaving his leg and shoulder to take his face in his hands. "Look at me and give me an answer, nanodayo, but think carefully!" The green irises had a flash Tetsuya didn't manage to identify. "Kuroko, even…even if the baby dies, you…could be able to come back to how it was before, do you get it, nanodayo? To Akashi and all the other dreams you should give up upon if you keep on going on… Maybe you should just let…"

"NO!" That scream, Kuroko was sure was the loudest ever escaped from his lips and the strength in his voice passed to his shoulders too because he managed to escape his father's grip, "NO! No, no, no! NO!"

It was just a second, but even from his pain sea Tetsuya could see the relieved light in Shintarou's irises, before this one turned toward his own father.

"Tell me what I have to do." he ordered, determined, to his parent.

Aiato suppressed the painful pulsing in his chest screaming him he couldn't do something like that to a barely-eighteen boy, then he took a deep breath.

"More towels, my case, hot water…quickly."

Shintarou jumped without adding anything and Sakura took his place in holding his son's right hand, while Haru held onto his left one.

Kuroko closed his eyes, threw his head backward and screamed again.

* * *

The teal hair seemed suddenly brittle and dark, glued to the forehead by a dried sweat, and the pale eyelids were closed on an ashen face. In the hospital bed, between candid sheets and with transparent tubes in his elbows, hand back and nose, he seemed like a marble statue whose blue shades were truthfully veins. He barely breathed, his chest didn't even seem to rise, and the machine at his left side showed a slowly, inconstant and exhausted heartbeat.

Yet, when the room door opened and Haru entered carefully, two blue faded eyes, with their sclera stained by the broken capillaries red, opened slowly on a minuscule white bundle stained in blood.

Those eyes raised, begging, and Haru offered them a fatigued smile.

"It's alright, Tecchan…" he murmured, but his voice was so distant and Kuroko was so tired…

Tetsuya held on long enough for just feel his father's hand on his forehead and his voice saying "He's in the incubator. He's fine, Tecchan, he's…" then everything went suddenly black.

The 'bip' from the machine besides his bed turned prolungated and still.

* * *

There was a lot of light and the sky outside the window was clear and pink, with the threes branches stretching upward shining in gold and browns and reds, like jewels on a woman's skin. If the 'outside' was a blaze of colors and warm bright shades, 'inside' the prevailing of white – the walls, the floors, the ceiling, the sheets, the machines, everything – created a sensation of cold and paralysis. Kuroko felt as if he had slept for years, when he finally opened his eyes.

He needed a moment to realize the frail and thin body under the blankets was his as much as the emaciated arms around the IV tubes, that the continuous sound of the machine to his left was the mirror of the heart in his chest and that the strange feeling of loss – like of something suddenly gone missing – was due to his _flat_ belly.

In the very second everything that had happened – the pain, the fear for himself and for his baby, the few brief flashes before losing consciousness – crumbled again on him, Kuroko jumped sitting up screaming.

"Wait, nanodayo!"

Tetsuya jerked, turning suddenly, only to find Shintarou's hands on his shoulders and the green-head a bit haggard and unkempt, pale and with heavy purple eye-bags, face in front of his.

… _he rips harshly the plastic shell of…something…sharp and sterilized and he_

 _passes it to Aiato being careful not to touch it._

 _The doctor takes the object, inhales deeply and then brings it near…_

A weak, uncaring of the IV, hand rose laboriously and clings to Midorima's shirt collar.

"…Where is him?" Kuroko begged in a hoarse voice and he didn't have the strength to say that word, _child_ , but he knew it wasn't necessary because the other would understood all the same, "How's him?!"

"He's fine." Midorima hurried up in nodding, in front of his friend's panic, carefully loosening with his the grip of the hand on his collar; he laid it gently near the phantom's side and force the other to lay down again, then he sat on the chair near the mattress with his elbows pressed on his knees and the fingers crossing themselves under the attentive gaze of his eyes. He let out a sound in between a snort and a sigh, but then he talked again. "He's strong, nanodayo." he commented, "He held on 'til we got to the hospital, almost twenty minutes. Now he's in the incubator making all the nurse going mad."

Tetsuya sighed in relief and then observed Midorima with a little expecting smile on his chapped lips.

"How's him?" he slowly asked, in a low voice, almost reverently, like a churchgoer talking of a miracle. Maybe, it was a bit of miracle.

While pronouncing that question, Tetsuya let his hand instinctively slipping on his flat belly, founding himself confused by the lack of rotundity that had become so familiar with time. He wondered how many times he had done that gesture imaging how would the baby growing within him look, dreaming about his birth day or the moment he would have take him in his arms for the first time. And now…

Midorima snorted, adjusting the glasses on his nose.

"A devil." he answered drily, but with a note of tenderness hidden in the irritation that Tetsuya noticed only thanks to the years training like a shadow, "He's always screaming, he doesn't leave anyone alone and the only one who manages to calm him at least for a bit is your father. But just a bit, and then began again." Shintarou gave him a vaguely hysterical look. "He sleeps an hour and screams again for two. Sleeps another hour and screams other two and half. An hour of sleep, one and half or two or two and half of screaming and so on ceaselessly. He's the devil himself, nanodayo."

Tetsuya smiled a bit to his friend's stress, but then a soft bitterness painted his lips.

"He took after Akashi-kun, then…" he murmured really lowly, as if scared by the mere idea of being heard.

"He took after you, you mean, nanodayo." Midorima retorted instead, deliberately ignoring the reference to the red-head as if nothing. Kuroko felt grateful for that silent declaration of formation. "He's _stubborn._ " the green-head was keeping on in the meanwhile, "My father says he probably has already memorized your smell and now this is his way to protest to be brought to you."

The machine near the bed lost a beat at those words, but when Shintarou turned Tetsuya had a tender smile on his lips and tears in his eyes. Teal irises rose to meet green ones.

"I want to see him." Kuroko felt his heart beating like crazy in his chest, the need to meet that creature come out of him was deleting everything else. He didn't manage to catch even just a glance of him, during the labor, because doctor Midorima had him sedated as possible and all that he remembered were confused and senseless flashes. He absolutely had to…

"No."

For a moment Tetsuya stared at Midorima, but then the word really reached him.

"Why?!" he exclaimed, suddenly panicking. For what reason should he not see his baby?!

Shintarou took a deep breath seeing the shocked and terrified expression of the teal-head, but then lifted his chin and sustained his gaze with seriousness.

"Your parents are talking with my father right now." he began, "During the whole labor and the travel to the hospital, your body has been subjected to an appalling exertion. In particular, your heart." He gulped, uncertain if it was his right to give that news, but then he closed his eyes, knowing he couldn't back off now, and opened them again darkly on his friend, "A little after the end of the labor, you had an heart attack."

* * *

Two days passed before Kuroko was allowed to leave his room and go – even if in a wheelchair – to visit his baby in the nursery, but it was worth it.

There was just an incutbator in that moment and the child in it was the most beautiful Tetsuya had ever seen. That he was his, _obviously_ , didn't influence his judgment. He was small, _very small_ , but he shook his clenched fists and bared feet to the sky while screaming so loudly that he was already tomato-red, almost as if demanding for something; he had a round and chubby face, his eyelids still closed and two thin lips right under a little and unequivocally Akashi's-style nose, but the light layer of hair on his head was still blondish and didn't allowed to understand which shade it was going toward. In his strong voice there was something commanding and maybe a little rage, but not sadness: Kuroko wouldn't have been able to explain it differently, but it looked like he was asking, better _ordering_ , something.

The young father was so caught up in observing his son that he didn't even realize of the blue-gown his mother was putting on him, at least not until when the woman took carefully his arms to put it in one of the four openings in the theca. All of a sudden, Kutoko felt an immensurable warmness against the back of one of his fingers and he jerked realizing it was the baby's fist skin.

A little panicking, he turned to his mother, but Sakura simply smiled at him, nodding encouraging.

"Let him know you're here." an old nurse advised, observing him from ad educate distance but with a smile on her lips, "He's waited for you for a really long time, you know?"

 _Me too._ , Tetsuya thought, but he didn't find the voice to say it. Instead, he turned to the theca and watched once more the little one. Slowly, hesitantly, he began stroking the little fist with the back of his finger.

The child lowered a bit the volume of his yells.

Kuroko chuckled a bit. He grew a bit more confident and with caution he made his finger slip within the closed hand of his son, feeling his mind accepting with surprise the huge warmth coming from that little body.

The child grip couldn't be considered as strong, but it tight a little around the finger of his parent and his cry, suddenly, stopped.

" _Domo_ ," Tetsuya murmured in the silence and he ignored the tears that were falling down his cheeks, " _Seiji_."

Kuroko Seiji waved his feet in the air to that greeting, but his hand kept on firmly holding his father's one, as if to prevent the other from leaving him again.

* * *

The first time Kuroko held Seiji in his arms, finally without the glass of the incubator between them, it was almost a month after is birth and for umpteenth time the phantom didn't manage not to get all teary-eyed, but this time he paid attention not to let the drops fall.

Seiji was a perfectly healthy child, without a single repercussion for his turbulent coming to the world. He had pink skin and chubby cheeks, two big but still closed eyes and lungs which didn't miss a chance to prove their strength to the young Shintarou; the hair on his head were changing from their blondish shade to a carrot-color, as Aomine kindly kept on underlining despite all the cuffs on his head that he punctually received from Momoi. Within Tetsuya's arms, he made the teal-haired boy look even more minute.

The phantom needed a good ten minutes to undersand how to hold the baby properly, accept that he wasn't made of frail crystal but that his hold needed to be a little more firm and that he absolutely wouldn't have let him fall. He was sure he had never carried a more important weight before.

At the beginning he rocked him gently whispering something, but soon it was clear that the kid had no intention to go to bed. He gurgled half-moans that seemed mutterings, but he didn't cry. He almost never did when with his dad and Kagami's theory was that he was a double-agent little demon that wanted to make all the rest of the world go crazy with his screams to keep Kuroko all of himself. Surprising everybody, Murasakibara and Momoi has declared to agree.

Tetsuya would have rolled his eyes to that umpteenth show of stupidity from his light if Midorima Aiato's words weren't that strong in his mind like the day he awakened and prevented him from enjoying completely that moment…

" _You're really young, Tetsuya, but an heart attack is a serious matter._

 _It was caused by the labor, that's true, but it doesn't mean_

 _now you're completely out of danger._

 _Your heart has been_ _ **seriously**_ _damaged and it's almost sure that_

 _from now on it will give you troubles, and even big._

 _As for now, all we can do is to prescribe you some medicines, but_

 _you'll have to start being really careful, got it?_

 _No exaggerated physical strains, no extreme sports and let's try_

 _avoiding strong or sudden emotions._

 _I know it will be difficult, expecially in this situation,_

 _with your first steps as a father," and Aiato has smiled a bit,_

 _sending a glance to Shintarou lying against the wall,_

" _but keep in mind that every effort may be dangerous_

 _for your heart, okay?"_

He and Shintarou had talked about it and in the end they had come to the same conclusion: Kuroko would have not abandoned the 'life-style' of the shadow despite basket being off-limits for him now. The apathy he had learned could make the difference, in that situation, and he didn't plan of leaving his baby alone very soon.

He took the feeding bottle the nurse offered him and a bit hesitant he tried to feed his son for the first time.

He hid his smile seeing him sucking greedily, but that didn't mean that, in his mistreated heart, he didn't feel the same the luckiest man on Earth.

* * *

Kuroko Seiji, at the early age of four months, was a little tyrant with fire-colored hair and baby blue eyes.

Right after his and Tetsuya's dismissal from the hospital, the new-family house was constantly invaded by big, strong and mostly stupid guys, but the baby seemed to have no problems at all in pushing them around, even being still unable to talk.

He didn't let Kagami and Aomine carrying him, immediately crying like a desperate; he had three minutes autonomy with Momoi and four with Riko, even five with Kise, but the only two he was willing to stay in the arms of were Himuro and Mitobe; Murasakibara still hadn't dared to take him for fear of hurting him and with Teppei the kid always found a sudden urge which usually forced to a rapid diaper-change. Hyuuga had laughed about the situation until when he discovered Seiji loved puking on him. With Midorima existed a reciprocal love-and-hate bound because the green-head never seemed so enthusiast about taking the little one, but there still were to be a day in which he didn't carry him in his arms; and the child did nothing but scream whenever he was in the doctor-to-be hold, but always cried if he was taken away from him before at least e quarter of hour. Takao had turned into the court jester and was the only one in the arm of who Seiji could even _sometimes_ laugh. But, usually, the boy's preferences were all for his father.

With Tetsuya, the little demon turned suddenly into an angel. He didn't often cry and when he did it was always in an reasonable range of decibel, he seemed to be content with holding his parent's finger and, since the very day he first opened his big amazing eyes and had finally began focusing the distant face of his father, he seemed to have fun in staring at him ceaselessly, gurgling satisfied.

Kuroko let his mask fall with him and always smile, exciting Kise's and Momoi's fake jealous whimpers.

Seeing them from the outside, or even just from Haru and Sakura's prospective, they looked like a bunch of freaks badly kept together, but Tetsuya considered them his family and thanked the whole Heaven every evening for them.

* * *

Near his fifth month, Seiji's right eye turned red. The left one remained azure.

* * *

Seiji was turning eight-months, a week and three-days old when a little task force composed by Midorima, Aomine, Kise, Takao, Mitobe and Himuro showed up at Kuroko's apartment at six in the evening.

Tetsuya, with his son in his arms, stood for a moment frozen on the door, at that sight. It wasn't strange for so many of them to appear to visit, but the time was uncommon.

"Minna." he greeted all the same, politely, while making path for his friends to get in, "Why here?"

For his surprise, Takao, Mitobe and Himuro took their shoes and jackets off and got in, but Midorima, Kise and Aomine stood on the doorstep.

"Give the adorable beast to the three fairy godmothers and get dressed." Daiki ordered pointing with his chin to the three black-haired boys, "You're hanging out with us this evening."

Tetsuya took a moment to elaborate and then gently gave one more to his first light to take back what he had just said, then, without hearing any 'Joking!' scream, he slammed the door in his ex-comrades' faces and turned to the three he deemed cleverer.

He found no compassion in the eyes of any of them, only a lot of pity and determination.

"You can't force me." he reminded and almost without noticing he strengthened a bit his hold on Seiji. The baby gurgled, offended.

"We're not here to force you into anything, Kuroko-kun." Himuro assured, raising his hands as if surrendering, but truthfully without backing off of a step, "You'd just like for you to try to understand…"

Before he could finish, Mitobe showed Kuroko a page of the block-notes he carried with to communicate when Koganei wasn't there as translator.

 _-You haven't get out of this house once since Seiji's birth. We understand how you feel and guess that, after all that happened, it must be difficult to think about leaving him alone, but…-_

Kuroko didn't manage to finish reading because Takao put a hand on his shoulders and reclaimed his attention.

"We're worried for you, Tecchan. The all of us." he said seriously, but then ventured a smile, "Consider it a personal favor to some old friends, okay?"

Kuroko tried to object, bringing Seiji closer to his chest as if fearing the three guys would have stolen him, but then Tatsuya was faster than him.

"You don't have to worry about anything." he assured, honest, "We'll take care of Seiji and swear we won't lose sight of him even for a second." He bent his head to a side, pleadingly. "Just a couple of hours so we can all put our hearts at peace. You got out, ate something, those three act like cretins for a bit and then you immediately come back. Nothing will happen."

As Himuro talked, Mitobe slowly got near and stretched his arms out to Tetsuya, silently asking for the kid.

Kuroko stepped back instinctively but so he noticed the low but continous knocking at the door and the annoyed muttering of the Miracled outside. He looked at Seiji.

The baby had his eyelids half closed on his eyes and was yawning for the third time in fifteen minutes. He had already eaten and had played restlessly with Kagami and Kiyoshi for the whole day so it was probable that he would soon be gone in dreamland and would not wake up for two or three hours at least. Maybe…

"We go out, eat, come back here." he murmured, "No deviations. And if anything happens, if he only coughs, you call me immediately."

"On our honor!" Takao swore, solemn, observing with a smile Mitobe slipping the little Seiji, in a red onesie, from his father's arms.

Only then the three guys realized the teal-head was wearing a crumbled slime-and-milk-stained jumpsuit. A meaningful glance passed between Kazunari and Tatsuya, while Rinnosuke sighed.

"Tecchan, you need this even more than what we thought."

* * *

Tetsuya re-discovered with awe the sensation of jeans on skin, as if he hadn't wore it in years, and when he observed himself in the mirror, wearing a white shirt with no stains and a leather blue jacket, he almost wondered who was that creature in the reflex.

His hair had grown and he hadn't noticed, he got thinner losing the kilos taken during pregnancy and maybe even some more without realizing even it and he had dark circles around his eyes he hadn't seen before.

"You've been locked up in your house for nine months, eighteen if we count the pregnancy time too, Kuroko-kun. It is almost a miracle you're not worse." Himuro commented in a low voice, patting his shoulder, and the teal-head nodded before exiting his room and marching back in the living room.

Seiji seemed to have regained a little of energy seeing his 'favourite' uncles and on the couch – in the room in front of the exit –, sitting on Mitobe's tights, turned toward him, he was playing with the black-head huge hands, lifting and lowering them with a big satisfied smile on his lips. Kuroko had a bad premonition regarding it and bit his lower lip, hesitant, but a glare from Takao prevented him from opening his mouth. At leas until he had taken his shoes.

"In anything happens…"

"…we'll call you." Takao concluded in his place.

Kuroko sent him a begging glance, but Kazunari, from his sitting beside Mitobe, caressed the little head earning from him a giggle, then he shot the father an encouraging smile.

Himuto, then, accompanied him to the door by pushing him by force and repeating reassuring things.

"Go!" he concluded, opening the door and pushing him in the mouth of three clearly offended ex-Miracles.

Kuroko hesitated, feeling a bit guilty, but then the door closed behind him and he turned suddenly.

Midorima, Kise and Aomine exchanged a meaningful glance, but in the end the blond one put an hand on the teal-head's shoulder to convince him to move.

"Let's go, Kurokocchi." he pushed, "We'll be back here before you notice."

Midorima nodded, adjusting the glasses on his nose, and when Tetsuya turned, he was the first one to leave with Ryouta toward the two-floor house hash.

Since Seiji's birth, the dog Nigou had moved with Riko Aida and the lower floor had turned into the new family's house to allow in the invading protectors and Sakura and Haru had moved to the higher one, when they were allowed to come home from the work keeping them busy with an inhumane schedule, like that evening. The idea of his parents not being there didn't help Kuroko at all.

"Maybe I should…" he hazarded, not even knowing what to say exactly, but Aomine grabbed him by putting an arm around his shoulders before he could turn.

"Don't do it." he ordered, forcing him to descend the two steps in front of the door, "Let's go, everything will be okay, got it?"

Kuroko looked at him, tall and strong in his black short-sleeved t-shirt, with the sunglasses snootily kept high on his head and with his eyes and hair showing off against the still bright sky of June. In that moment, he could have believed him if a powerful desperate crying hadn't reached them half-way of the alleyway.

Midorima and Kise froze still and didn't dare to turn.

For a moment nobody had the courage to move a muscle and from inside Seiji screamed again, full strength, with a suffering Kuroko remembered hearing in him only when he had colic.

When he heard Kuroko's low and suffering voice reaching him with a pleading "Aomine-kun…", Daiki already knew he had lost, but tried all the same.

"Tetsu…"

He made the mistake of turning. Little under his arm, Tetsuya was watching him from downward with his apathetic expression, but his eyes were a storm of desperate necessity.

Aomine sighed, but put down his arm from his friend's shoulders.

"You'll have to pay me back for this…" he muttered.

Kuroko flashed him a minuscule smile, barely visible, like the ones he did in middle school, before turning and running again toward the door, keys already in hand.

Rueful, Aomine reached his friends.

"We wouldn't have been able to bring him anywhere all the same, after he had heard him crying, Aominecchi." Kise reassured, patting the blue-head's back, "We'll try again some other time."

"'Kay…" muttered the other, but he didn't sound convinced.

Midorima limited himself to sigh silently.

* * *

After the third failed attempt, Midorima chose to try with another solution: an afternoon 'date' _with Seiji_. Everybody agreed that Tetsuya would have not relaxed much taking his son outside for almost the first time, but that the both of them stood locked in their house any longer was out of question.

Seiji was nine moths when Tetsuya draped a red scarf around his neck to protect him from the September wind, smiled seeing him all wrapped up in his red outfit and beige jacket and in the end helped him putting on his shoes before carrying him in his arms. He approached the door, but hesitated for a second.

He was conscious about the absolute foolishness of his behavior up until then, but inside him he couldn't help it. He had risked losing Seiji once and in his mind, somewhere, resisted the absurd instinct telling him that if he'd brought him out, something bad would happen. Honestly, he had brought him to Midorima's, Kagami's, Kise's, everybody's place, but they had never hanged out in the streets or at the park. Delinquents, cars, germs…Tetsuya saw dangers everywhere and thus the hand on the handle began trembling a bit and the other held closer to his chest his baby. Not to mention the risk of…

"Kuroko."

The teal-head turned, looking for Midorima. The others were waiting outside, so the two of them were the only one left in the house to get Seiji and the bag with his things ready.

"Yes?" he asked, covering his hesitation.

"Akashi's not coming home from America, this summer. Even if we went to Kyoto right in front of his house, he couldn't see us."

Tetsuya widened his eyes, but was fast to take back his impassibility. He adjusted Seiji in his arms wondering when he and Midorima had become so close to allow the both of them to understand each others' thoughts so easily. Probably while Shintarou was helping in opening his belly, he guessed.

Be as it was, he let the green-head pass and hid his uncertainness limiting himself in holding his son while the other opened the door and made him room to let him out.

"Thank you…" he murmured however, passing in front of him.

That name was no more said for the whole rest of the day.

* * *

Seiji had never laughed so much and Tetsuya seemed to have forgotten his wax mask at home while, shoulders against a tree and raise knees, he had the red-head sitting on his belly and laying against his tights to hold his hands and allowed him to have his fun while playing with them like they were maracas.

Takao laughed too when Seiji began waving his feet and letting out a series of amazed screams as soon as Midorima appeared within his sight to leave beside the two Kurokos a bottle of water and an homogenized. The doctor surely was an inspiration for the little's troath.

Well, not that little anymore. Kuroko knew nine-months were really few, but if confronted with then he was a bundle come out too early from his belly, Seiji had grown a lot. His round traits were sharpening a bit paradoxically, but just a bit. His red hair stood proud and messy on his head, since Kagami had dared to pass an hand through them, and made him look like a just born version of Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter. His two heterochromatic eyes were big and looked around shining brightly with the children's light. It was a bundle with a sugar level to diabetes, as Kise gently pointed out.

Another detail of that afternoon at Ueno Park, on the riverside, was the presence of a big hairy beast at the moment sitting to make guard attentively near his new little friend.

Nigou had ran from Riko, keeping him with the lash, to chase away some birds approaching Seiji and that Aomine, left with the child while the father greeted his dog, had not deemed dangerous. For a moment, panic spread when the huge adult husky ran growling toward the boy, but the dog simply sent the birds away and then, turning toward that strange bundle, had substituted his barking with a confused 'expression'. Seiji had burst out laughing and grabbed his ears when Nigou bent to smell him. Since then, separating dog and child had turned out to be impossible. But Kuroko was happy about it, because it meant being able to take the animal back with them. Riko seemed to be as much relieved as them.

"Ohi, what age do children start talking?"

Tetsuya raised his eyes on Kagami hearing that question, but it was Midorima, professional, who answered adjusting the glasses on his nose.

"Between eighth and ninth month, nanodayo." he said, and then turned toward the baby, "Truthfully, he should start soon. This sounds are already his first attempts of copying our words."

Tetsuya lowered his gaze on the attentive face of Seiji – who had pulled an hand out of his to bring it to his mouth and try to eat it whole, closed in a fist – and ignored Aomine and his whimpers on the line of "When the little monster will learn to talk, he'll make us all his personal slaves, you'll see!" to observe his son in the eyes. A cornflower-colored irises and a bloody one focused on his interested and waited, unbelievably patient and concentrated.

" _Pa-pa._ " Kuroko slowly spelled, gaining all the kid's attention, "Seiji, _papa._ "

Seiji looked at his father for a long moment…and then burst out laughing happily, screaming and waving hands and feet at the same time.

Tetsuya laughed a bit too, even his sighing.

"Something like this…" he praised, nodding to the satisfied child.

"Well, it wasn't that bad for his first attempt…" Teppei tried to support, but Hyuuga interrupted him.

"Come on!" he exclaimed, pointing at the child who bent is head to try to see him, forcing Kuroko to carry him in his arm so that he was turned toward the center of the circle of guys sitting on the grass, "You can't pretend that a moment for the other he learns to say ' _Otou-san_ ' even with the honorific as if nothing!"

"Right, he's smart, but…"

"' _To-tan._ "

Takao fell silent in the middle of his sentence and for a second they all stood still, but then, slowly, various pairs of eyes laid on the child who, a index near his mouth and the other hand stretched out toward his father's face eyeing him in disbelief, valued seriously the results obtained with just that little effort.

"' _To-tan._ " he repeated, trying to steal Tetsuya's nose and then laughing when he realized the amazed trance fell around him, " _'To-tan!_ "

In the shocked and a bit scared silence, Kuroko realized his son had just said his first word and laughed.

* * *

"Don't you dare!" Aomine growled, grabbing an intrepid crawling Seiji before he managed to try to get down the entrance steps leading to the door and the shoe rack.

The kid muttered, offended, before starting screaming loudly: " _'Tou-tan!_ "

"Well, good, it's useless to try." the blue muttered, laying the little on his shoulder and holding him with an arm to bring him back to the living room carpet, putting him down and then sitting leg crossed in front of him. Elbow on a knee and cheek on his fist, Daiki glared at the little monster. "Your dad's taking a shower, can you give him a fifteen minutes break?" he muttered, "You're a slaver like your father…"

Seiji sat up from his prone position and then stood watching the blue with an attention which was quite scaring from a ten-months-and-half old kid. Aomine felt chills every time. All of a sudden, something behind Daiki seemed to catch the baby's attention and the man turned immediately, ready to see a cloud of scissors falling down on him.

Nothing.

Aomine frowned.

"Listen here, are you mocki-…" The sentence died in his throat when he turned and found out that Seiji was no more sitting in front of him. "Uh?"

When he realized he had really lost his best friend's not-even-a-year-old son, he screamed.

* * *

He couldn't have gone far, Aomine was sure of it. He was a little brat not even able to walk properly and barely good at saying 'Daddy', 'food', 'pizza' – _pitta_ to be precise, courtesy of Kagami – and some little things of basic need. He already had a lot of uncles to remember the names, probably in that tiny brain of his there was no room left for more useful words like 'boobs', 'basket' and 'nap', despite his efforts to teach them to him. Well, be as it was, he had to find him quickly, before…

"Aomine-kun."

Aomine jerked squeaking, terrified, and then turned, ready to try to stop by pleading the hell that was going to be thrown down on him.

Seiki, wrapped in a towel and with wet hair glued to his forehead, giggled pointing at him from his place of honor within his father's arms.

" _Tai-tan!_ " he gurgled happily, but his dad, despite the caresses he was leaving on his head, didn't seem to share the feeling.

"Aomine-kun," he repeated and Daiki found himself cursing a baby, " _why_ did my son popped out suddenly in the bathroom when he was supposed to be here with you?"

Deeming his death already unavoidable, Aomine chose to look at the bright side of it.

"Bakagami will have an hard time with two shadows around."

Kise referred he had never seen a bigger bruise than the one the blue brought home on his side, that evening.

* * *

The first year was always the hardest, or so his mom had told him.

Kuroko had believed her and clenched his teeth for those first twelve months, but when he helped his son blowing off the single candle on his first birthday cake, surrounded by – _almost_ – all of his middle and high school friends, he found himself thinking that, yes, it was really worth it.

He thought about Akashi in that occasion, about how beautiful it would have been to have him there with them, but then he chased the guy's image from his head and, ignoring the subtle pain that took his heart, he smiled at Seiji in his arms.

The baby looked attentively at him and then burst out laughing.

"'Tou-tan!"


	3. Chapter II

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

* * *

 _ **Chapter II**_

* * *

"Are you ready?"

Tetsuya wore his apathetic expression with a black jacket and a pair of blue-jeans in a couple of black walking boots. Knelt on the sidewalk, he finished fixing the red hair of the child standing in front of him, who waited patiently for the operation to be completed before answering.

Despite the sun and the teal sky, April's air was still cold and had its fun in slipping in the openings of the two twin scarf carefully wrapped around father's and son's necks. The cherry trees in the courtyard near them were stretching their branches full of pink blossoms toward the sky and seemed to be welcoming happily the children, someone laughing and someone on the verge of tears, passing inexorably over the tall iron green gate which would have protected them until the coming of afternoon and parents.

"Seiji is not worried for the school." the little one said all of a sudden, his puerile voice firm like the gaze in those heterochromatic irises, one red and one teal, and the hands holding – maybe a bit more than necessary – the shoulder-belts of the red school-back carried over a dark blue jacket, "He's worried for Otou-san."

Kuroko widened his eyes a bit, surprised, but then laid the arms on his own bent knees and allowed himself half a smile.

"For…Otou-san?" he asked.

Kuroko Seiji observed his father for a bit before answering.

"Otou-san can't keep calm if he doesn't see Seiji." he muttered, a serious and a bit offended expression on his little face, "Otou-san always checks where and how is Seiji, even if he is with the uncles. Will Otou-san be fine even if Seiji is at school?"

A breath of crisp wind ruffled the hair of both father and son, ignoring their different colour, and brought over them a flock of little cherry flowers in a pale shy pink, but the two kept on watching each other and didn't pay them attention.

Tetsuya smiled a bit more.

"Otou-san will be worried for the whole day." he admitted and in the meanwhile stretched an hand to caress the kid's cheek, "Thus, Seiji has to make a promise to his daddy."

"What?" the little one immediately asked, his irises shining at the idea of such an important duty, and Kuroko smiled again.

"Seiji must promise his daddy that he'll be careful." he ordered, with a gentle firmness in his voice, "If Seiji promises this, then daddy promises he'll bring him to eat a milkshake after school, agreed?"

At that corruption, Seiji burst out laughing and raised his arms to the sky, celebrating, then ran rapidly in the courtyard, turning back to greet his waiting father by waving an arm.

Kuroko answered his gesture until when his son disappeared behind the kindergarden doors, then sighed.

He slowly got up, forcing himself to ignore the interested whispers of the moms around the school gate, and slipped the hands in his pockets turning and hurrying up in getting away, directing toward the bust stop. Not sparing himself a couple of anxious looks at the building he was leaving behind.

He waited for the bus head-low and with his gaze obstinately fixed on his own feet and when it finally arrived, he hurried up in getting in before someone else, oblivious of his presence, pushed him. He looked for the most far from others seat and turned facing the window, trying to ignore all the other passengers. Once, he would have studied them carefully, training, but now the only thing he cared for was not to be noticed and vanishing quickly.

Six stops after, Tetsuya got off the bus risking to be pushed down the steps by and old woman with a lot of bags, who didn't noticed him. He muttered some excuses, ignoring the fact that it wasn't his fault, and hurried up in mixing with the crowd on the sidewalk, marching stubbornly until reaching his destination, a big local with huge glass windows and over the wooden door of which headed the written "The Clock – Butler Café".

Kuroko sighed.

Seiji was three now, but only one when Tetsuya suffered of his second heart attack. He didn't remember it very well, he only knew that his son was having fun showing everybody his new ability of walking, laughing while running from Kise to Aomine and back while his father watched over him while leaning onto the door jamb, slowly drinking his tea; then suddenly an unbelievable pain took his chest, with no reasons, and everything had gone black. He had woken up in the hospital the following day, only the hear Midorima telling him that his exhausted heart had stopped another time and that, even if luckily a CPR had been enough to reanimate him, it was not so given that it would go well again in case of a third attack. After that, things turned to worst.

With the consequently medical expenses to face – the continuous check-ups with the cardiologist and the medicines, in particular – united to the ones for the growing child, the Kuroko family had to get through a lot of difficulties that brought Haru and Sakura to accept again overseas jobs even of a lot of months and Tetsuya to find himself a job. Despite the fact that Seiji's birth story had been kept almost a secret, the teal-head soon had had to face his condition of single parent with no graduation, and that limited a lot his possibilities to work. His friend had tried to help him to make it to the night school by taking them care of Seiji, but it hadn't worked because the expenses grew with the entrances not doing the same and in the end it turned out inevitable to give up. Working at the Butler Café "The Clock" surely had never been his dream, but Tetsuya knew he didn't have a choice: the owners didn't ask for a particular school certificate but only for a pleasant look and a perfect education, they allowed him to take upon himself only the night shifts during the two precedent years, so that he could spent his day with Seiji, and now that the boy had begun school they were willing to extend his contract to the morning hours.

Midorima had made a face at the increasing of stress, but Kuroko had shifted his attention on the increasing of his pay, forcing him to keep silent his objections about the teal's heart.

Sighing again, Tetsuya approached the entrance door, ready to slip silently into his butler role, but the ringtone of his phone interrupted him.

He frowned reading the caller ID, but in the end he answered.

"Midorima-kun, I'm going to work. If it isn't urgent…"

" _It is urgent._ "

Tetsuya raised a bit an eyebrow for being interrupted like that, despite knowing that the other couldn't see him, and began searching in his pockets with his free hand trying to get the keys out.

"And it would be…?"

" _Akashi. He's back in Japan._ "

A subtle tingling accompanied the crushing of the keys on the asphalt.

* * *

The cold air was ruffling his hair, but Kuroko really couldn't bring himself to worry about it. Honestly, he could bring himself to worry even for the renewed whispering of the moms behind him or the doubtful gazes, some even suspecting, laying on his thin but clearly manly figure standing in front of the kindergarten, _too young for being a parent_. He absolutely couldn't concentrate on anything that wasn't the image with fire red hair, ruffled by the wind like his, _almost as if he was there, because he was back_ , until when the sound of a bell made him raise his eyes on the garden in front of him and in the end another mass of red ruffled locks caught his attention completely.

"Seiji!" he called, raising a hand to be noticed, knowing well that otherwise it would have been difficult for the kid to spot him.

Strangely enough, the boy already had his eyes fixed on him and opened in a huge smile seeing him. A moment later, he was already running to his father, with the schoolbag bobbing on his back at each step.

Tetsuya knelt down and spread his arms just in time for his son to jump within them, lacing his behind his neck and laughing straight to his ear.

Kuroko held him tight, instinctively, while Midorima's words came back to buzz in his brin; he clang to the child as if he was his last hope and, at the same time, as if he was scared to see him vanishing every second from now, with the feeling that someone could take him away with no second chance.

"…Otou-san?" Seiji called in a low voice, surprised, when he noticed that his father didn't seem prone to finish their hug.

Kuroko immediately shifted back, hiding behind a little tender smile his worrying and, with his hands on the kid's shoulders, he allowed himself a moment to observe him straight in the face.

"Gomen, Seiji. Daddy didn't manage not to worry." he lied – only in part, because nobody could have ever denied how much he panicked after the news of Akashi's come back –, but then he hurried up in changing the topic, "How did it go?"

The red-head showed him a huge bright smile, leaving his eyes to shine in enthusiasm.

"Seiji played hide-and-seek and won always!" he exclaimed, clearly proud and impatient to see his father's reaction, "Seiji always found everyone, but nobody found Seiji!" For a moment he turned thoughtful. "Seiji scared by mistake the sensei because she didn't see him…"

Kuroko blinked a couple of times at that chaos of news that, honestly, he didn't feel like accepting in his mental state. That Seiji could have inherited his lack of presence was more of a certainty than a possibility, but the idea of him having somehow inherited even in the slightest part Seijuro's Emperor Eye… Tetsuya had to admit it was a bit of a scary prospective.

"How good." he praised all the same, smiling at the child while taking his school bag and getting back on his feet, "But now we have to go: this morning daddy promised someone a milkshake…" He brought a hand to his chin and raised his eyes to the sky, pretending he was thinking, "I really can't remember to who, though… Maybe Murasakibara-kun? He really loves sweets and…"

"No!" Tetsuya lowered his head with a smile when Seiji grabbed laughing his leg, "To Seiji, to Seiji!"

"To Seiji? And who's that?" the teal-head provoked. Midorima-kun assured him there was nothing strange in the kid talking of himself in third person and that the contact with other children would have soon helped him taking familiarity with the different verbal conjugations and so Tetsuya let him be, but sometimes he tried to tease him to see how was him.

"Me, me!" the red-head in fact jumped and Kuroko prized him ruffling his hair, thing that Seiji liked as much as he hated it.

"Okay, okay." he nodded, taking his son's hand and walking with him, "Vanilla flavour?"

"Chocolate!" the little one shook his head, making a face while hearing the other taste.

Kuroko sighed, faking desperation, but the smile was rapid in blooming on his lips again.

* * *

As already foresaw, the chocolate milkshake ended up everywhere more than in Seiji's stomach.

Tetsuya ignored Midorima's irritated clamours, being him a fixated host in Kuroko's house but present there in that occasion more to assure of the father's mental condition that of the son's physical one, and brought the still laughing boy with him in the bathroom.

"Kuroko…!"

"Midorima-kun, later."

And his voice was so tired and desolated that Shintarou didn't have the heart to answer if not with a "I'll come back by nine". A shiver went down Tetsuya's back at those words, but the teal-head faked indifference and kept on wandering around the house looking for some clean clothes with Seiji loyally perched on his arm.

As he had always done since when little – _since when more little_ – Seiji showed an observance skill out of the norm and an unbelievable ability of picking the most hidden shades of anybody's emotions, even if often he wasn't able to understand or recognize them. He couldn't distinguish pain or loss or melancholy, but he could pick them like a hawk and his childish instinct catalogued them all as sadness, pushing him to act to erase it. The last time Aomine and Kise had a fight, the boy tried to give his basketball as a present to the former and climbed of his own volition on the latter's lap to kiss his cheek. The blue and the blond heads made up less than thirty minutes later.

Thus, Kuroko was only partially surprised when his son wrapped tighter the arms around his neck and hid the face against his clavicle.

"Can Otou-san bath with Seiji?" he asked slowly.

Kuroko smiled at that clear effort to cheer him up, then nodded, detatching a bit his son to brush their nose together.

"I have to, a little monster covered me in chocolate milk-shake."

"Seiji is not a little monster!"

* * *

The bathroom warm air, the subtle stratus of steam and the feeling of the hot water on his skin managed to relax a bit Tetsuya's stiff muscles, leaving him laying with his back against the bathtub side and the little Seiji between his crossed legs, playing with a azure rubber chick and a mountain of bubbles.

Kuroko let him do, limiting himself to keep the hands on his sides just to be sure and to observe him in silence, and the boy kept quiet, without cackling nor agitating in the large embrace of his father, maybe conscious of the tiredness of the other.

To be a three years old child, he was as mature in some things as childish in others: he talked about himself in third person, but played in the absolute silence just to allow his father to relax; went to school without sheading a tear and hiding skilfully his worriedness, but then he wasn't able to drink his milk-shake without sheading almost three quarters on his clothes. In those moments, Kuroko saw a lot of Akashi in him, from the intrinsic strength that the red-head always wore to the behaviour sometimes immature he could keep up when with him, and couldn't help but imagine how beautiful it would have been if the other was there with them. Flashes of Seiji kneeling to wish Seiji a good day at school or cleaning his mouth from the chocolate stains, lifting him on his shoulders to make him laugh or soaping his hair…

Seijuro would have made a good father, Tetsuya was sure of it, but not when eighteen, not with an whole life to build and with _his_ father ready to ruin it for 'dirtying' the family name with a bastard son born from another male, who honestly was just a joke of nature who shouldn't have been able to procreate.

As usual, that chain of thoughts brought a sting of pain to the teal-head's hear and he began shaking his head stubbornly, determined to erase it from his mind. Of all the evening, _that one_ he couldn't afford to think such a thing.

"Otou-san?" Tetsuya lifted his eyes and Seiji answered his gaze by bending his head a bit to a side, confused. "Are you fine?"

Kuroko nodded, faking calmness, and stretched a hand to ruffle his son's wet hair, but thus he opened a hole in the foam wall and the kid protested, offended. Tetsuya readied himself for an endless bantering – too much in Midorima's style, to his tastes –, but instead Seiji stopped before even beginning, caught by something under the water surface.

He was going to ask, when his son preceded him.

"Otou-san, what's that?"

Seiji's index was little and thin while pointing naively, with childish curiosity, to the big white sign of his father's pale belly, the subtle and knobby gash that obediently curved under his belly-hole, the scar of a caesarean cut that looked almost like the stylized smile of an emoji.

Tetsuya passed his hand slowly, under the water surface, on that mark and the kid instinctively lifted his eyes toward his face, observing carefully the smile on his father's lips.

"This" the adult answered, picking the little one in his arms to bring him to sit on his tight and be able to cross his legs and point better to the sign, "is where you came out from." His cerulean and scarlet irises followed the hand's movement, but than stopped on the scar even when the bigger fingers got up to caress his head. "Gomen," Kuroko concluded with a vague shade of bitterness in his voice, "daddy wasn't very good in helping you so uncle Midorima had to take you out."

Seiji welcomed thoughtfully that news and for a long moment kept silent to contemplate his discover. Thus, frowning, he raised his head and looked for his father's eyes.

"If Seiji came out of Otou-san's belly, does it mean Otou-san is Seiji's Okaa-san?"

For a moment, Tetsuya stared in confusion at his son's face. Then he burst out laughing.

"I guess" he commented between laughter, bringing an hand in front of his mouth to not offend his snappish son, "you're right."

"Then, who is Seiji's Otou-san?"

As it was born, Kuroko's laughter died. His eyes, big and cerulean, fell on Seiji's round face, but brought to his mind a completely different image. Longer scarlet hair, two identical red eyes, sharp and elegant face traits, a malicious and satisfied grin, pale skin…

 _Your father is the best man I've ever known, sometimes stubborn and bit bossy and overbearing, but good and protective, strong and determined like you'll grow to be._

It would have been so nice to be able to say those words, to show the little one a photo of them man who gave him life, pointing to him all those traits they had in common and telling him what a strange and impossible but amazing person Akashi Seijuro was.

It would have been nice and Kuroko promised himself, when his son was born, that one day he would have done it, but _that day_ he couldn't find any strength within himself. Not while knowing that in a few hours he would have been again in front of the red-head in person.

" _He wants to meet us. All."_

" _Midorima-kun…"_

" _Kuroko, if you won't be there, he'll get suspicious, you know it, nanodayo."_

" _I can't… I can't, Midorima-kun, I can't! I can't, I…!"_

" _He'll check you up, Kuroko, you know him too! And it wouldn't take long for him to find your address, maybe even…"_

"… _about Seiji. … Midorima-kun, Akashi-kun must not know about Seiji! Absolutely!"_

" _Kuroko…"_

" _Midorima-kun, please!"_

"…"

" _Please…"_

" _Akashi wants to meet us and if you won't be there he'll get suspicious, but if you show up and act normally…"_

" _I can do it."_

" _No, you can't, nanodayo. I'm calling Takao and telling him to fetch Mitobe-san or Himuro-san, better if both. It wouldn't be enough to keep you calm, but at least we know they'll remember to send you a text per hour to keep you updated about Seiji."_

"… _And Takao-kun will keep you updated as well."_

" _Tsk, just to foresee your reactions and know how to act to prevent you from making him suspicious, nanodayo."_

" _Midorima-kun."_

" _What, nanodayo?"_

" _Thank you."_

" _Don't thank me, Kuroko. This won't be a pleasant evening."_

" _I know. Thank you all the same."_

A grip far too weak to define as such ripped Tetsuya from his thoughts making him slam his back against the bathtub side. He needed a moment, but in the end he bent his head and lowered his eyes on his belly, finding Seiji pressed against his skin, the short arms trying to surround his waist and his faced covered with a scared expression turned upward. His heterochromatic eyes got quickly teary.

"Gomen, papa!" the little one exclaimed, using the more affectionate nick he used only in exceptional cases, when he did something or when he particularly wanted to show is love. He looked so scared Kuroko didn't managed to get what happened since when the chain of apologies involuntarily told him. "Seiji didn't want to make papa sad! Seiji is sorry! Seiji apologizes!"

Tetsuya understood. Immediately, he wrapped his arms around his son and held him to his chest posing a hand on his back and one on his head and thus, hugging him, he sighed.

"Seiji, you don't have to apologize at all." he assured, whispering lowly, trying with his voice to calm the boy, "Daddy was thinking, he didn't mean to worry you." He took a deep breath, a bit because of self-disappointment and a bit to find strength, and then he loosened a bit his hold and tried to look at his son's face, "Seiji, about your father…"

"Seij-… _I_ don't want to know!" Kuroko stood there, speechless, in front of the kid shaking his head and trying to use the first person, as if to distract his father from his bad thoughts by offering him a new goal to celebrate. " _I_ don't want to know." he repeated a bit lower, posing both of his fists on Kuroko's chest and raising his gaze to look at his face, " _I_ have a daddy who made me come out of his belly like a mommy, so I'm fine this way."

And before Tetsuya managed to say something, Seiji was again hugging him, hiding the face against his skin. After a moment, with a sad smile on his lips, even the adult hugged back.

"I love you, Seiji." he murmured against his son's head, kissing his red hair, "Like a dad and a mom together. I love you _so much_."

Seiji giggled feeling his locks being ruffled by his father's face.

"Seiji loves his mommy-daddy too!" he declared, flashing the other a huge smile, as brith as the very sun.

And Kuroko smiled, ignoring the third person coming back.

* * *

When the door bell rang once, Kuroko was already behind the door, ready to open it.

He greeted with a nod the three black-haired guys entering silently, but then grabbed Takao by an arm.

"He's already half-asleep." he whispered, "I told him I was going to work, so if he wakes up and asks about me…"

"…we'll tell him you're at the café, okay." Kazunari nodded seriously, but then gave the teal-head a compassionate pat on the shoulder, "Good luck."

Tetsuya nodded with a sigh, greeted slowly the other two and then shot an anxious look at his son's bedroom, but then hurried up in exiting and closing the door behind him, conscious that otherwise he would have ran back to curl up near his baby and hold him tight until the very second Akashi would leave for who-knows-where.

Midorima was waiting for him outside the garden gate and watched him coming near with a critical eye.

"You're wearing a shirt." he commented, "And a necktie. Nanodayo."

Tetsuya dared a look at his own out-fit. Black sneakers, a pair of jeans with some cuts here and there on his tights, the teal shirt matching with his eyes and a black necktie wore loose. He strengthened instinctively his hold on the black jacket he was carrying on an arm taking advantage of the warm evening air.

"I didn't know what to do." he murmured a bit defensively, "Kise-kun's holy book of fashion didn't have the chapter ' _What to wear to meet after three years the father, who doesn't know to be such, of your illegitimate and secret son_ '."

Midorima simply sighed in answer, but then motioned with his head to the other to follow him and the two started walking down the alley that would bring them to the restaurant where Kise, the organizer of the evening, gave them appointment to. The blonde man chose on purpose a place near Kuroko's house, so that he could be a little calmer knowing that if an emergency should ever occur he could have ran quickly to his son.

They had just overcame the block, when Tetsuya dared to speak.

"Seiji asked me who's his father, today." he revealed, "He saw the scar of the caesarean cut."

Midorima stopped in the middle of the street, paralized, and Kuroko realized it only after overcoming him of two steps. He stopped and turned toward the green head.

"What did you answer?" this one questioned, answering with a serious gaze to an apathetic one.

"Nothing. He figured out I didn't want to talk about it and told me didn't want to know, anymore, that he didn't need it." Eyelids fell on azure irises, hiding their pain. "I'm an awful parent, if my son has to worry so much for me."

"Baka, nanodayo." Tetsuya opened his eyes again, but only to see the other passing him, resuming his walking. He turned and reached him, but Shintarou kept on looking onward even while continuing. "That kid is really like you."

"Like me?"

"Observant, smart and damn selfless, nanodayo."

Kuroko let out a little laughter then accepted the tense but almost accomplice silence that accompanied him and Midorima to the restaurant where hell was waiting for them.

* * *

The restaurant wasn't that much exaggerated, with short tables in dark wood and rice paper walls but no music in the background, only the low sizzle of the fires, and, since it was a weekday, there were relatively even few people, so that the atmosphere was calm and relaxed. At least for someone.

Tetsuya, on the other hand, clenched his fists on his tights and took a deep breath, the umpteenth, to cool down. Midorima, on his left, and Aomine, sitting at the head of the table on his right, spied on him discretely, but said nothing. Murasakibara, at the other head of the table, was eating nervously from a packet of crisps, but the most obvious of them was surely Kise, sitting in front of the teal-head, with his fake smile, the pale face and the hands hidden under the table because victims of an unstoppable tremor.

Daiki grunted slamming an hand, but not hard, on the table. Despite his delicacy, Tetsuya and Ryouta jerked all the same.

"Where the fuck is he?!" the blue-head growled, nervous, "He had to be here ten minutes ago!"

"I already told you, nanodayo." Midorima lowly hissed, adjusting the glasses on his nose, "He was stuck in the traffic, he'll be there soon."

"Neh, but what do we do if Aka-chin finds out about…" Murasakibara couldn't finish his sentence because the door of the restaurant, behind him, opened making him turn and catchin all the gazes of the table.

Even Tetsuya lifted his eyes on the new-comer and mentally thanked all the heavens for not ever stopping hiding his emotions.

Akashi Seijuro had changed in the three years he spent in America. He grew taller even if not too much, keeping his advantage of five centimetres over the teal-head, and his shoulders enlarged a bit; his usually pale skin was a little tanner, but kept on contrasting with the flaming colour of his hair and eyes. The thin lips were a bit reddened too, maybe because of the cold wind, but opened all the same in a vague smile when his irises fell on the five guys sitting at the table waiting for him. He was gorgeous, saying a few; even more than when he left.

He started taking off his black leather jacket and Kuroko wished to die when he recognized it, because it was the one he had given him as a present.

Under it, Seijuro was wearing a red shirt on a pair of black jeans and a necktie of the same shad tied loose.

Tetsuya immediately fixed his eyes on the table, refusing to continue the inspection and feeling like a huge, enormous idiot.

Midorima turned toward him pretending to be checking on his lucky item of the day, a lion plush, while Kise got up to reach for Akashi.

"It looks like you two did it on purpose, nanodayo." he slowly said, "Your clothes…"

"Midorima-kun, please." the teal-head whispered in the lowest of the voices, stopping the other, but then the red-head reached their table and the both of them felt obliged to move their gazes on him.

"Minna." he said, his voice calm and educate. He had a placid expression on his face, as if he was perfectly fine with the situation, as if he felt absolutely _nothing_ at the idea of being in front of the lover he once planned on going to live with and who betrayed him during his absence, using as an excuse his ill mother. "Sorry for the late."

And Kuroko almost lost his apathetic expression in favour of a shocked one when Akashi sat where Kise was before, right in front of the teal-head.

A moment of panic took everyone, but the red one seemed, or pretended, not to noticed and smiled to the others.

"It's a bit of a long time since our last meeting." he commented, "It's nice to see you all again."

The four Miracles left exchanged a look, but Kuroko kept his gaze still and apathetic on Seijuro. It wasn't like he could do anything else when the other was staring at him so clearly, the phantom of a smile on his lips.

 _Don't look at me. Don't look at me like this, please._ , Kuroko felt the need to run, get out of the restaurant and run until he reached his house, until he found Seiji, until he was in front of his precious baby and remembered _why_ he couldn't simply stretch on the table and claimed his that mouth, praying not to find there another taste.

 _Three years…_ Did he find someone else?, had there been someone else during that time?, who was him?, why that person? A hundred of questions swirled in the phantom's mind, but Kuroko forbade them from getting mirrored in his eyes.

Instead, he imagined the bright smile of Seiji in the bathroom and said: "Welcome back in Japan, Akashi-kun."

Probably that wasn't the answer Akashi had imagined because his smile trembled for a second, as if uncertain if curling downwards, but as it was born the hesitation disappeared.

"Thank you." he answered, reserving him a smile before turning to the others.

"Aka-chin, you didn't come back for three years." Murasakibara was muttering, "You could have at least called."

Seijuro turned his whole head to answer to the purple giant and the movement of air threw the faintest of the traces of the red-head's scent on Kuroko's face.

The teal-head barely held back from shaking his head. It wasn't possible that from that distance and with all the scents from the kitchen he could have caught Akashi's smell, it was surely his mind playing a trick on him as a punishment for leaving Seiji alone at home.

Instinctively, Kuroko slipped his phone out of the pocked and checked the display, but not even three quarters of an hour had passed since when he left the house so there were no messages from the three baby-sitters. The teal-head sighed, already feeling anxious, and then lifted his head again in time to hear Akashi talking with Murasakibara.

"I know," he was explaining, crossing the arms on his chest, "sadly enough the boarding school rules were truly severe. I barely had the time to call my father, calling others was completely impossible."

Tetsuya frowned.

"Boarding school?" he asked, confused, but Akashi's answered made him wish he kept silent.

"The apartment I bought was too big for a single person." he simply answered, but with an intense gaze. It wasn't accusing nor mocking; just…it seemed to be waiting for a reaction. Reaction Tetsuya forced himself to mask.

"I head you didn't come back even once during the breaks." Aomine changes – not really discretely – the topic after a second, pretending to be checking the menu before passing it to Kuroko, who took it barely resisting the urge to hide behind it, "What happed? They didn't even let you do that?"

"I worked for the American branches of some of my father's companies, during my days off." the red-haired one answered instead, shaking his head, "It was a good occasion."

"I guess…" Daiki muttered, but before he could add something else a waiter approached them to get their orders and luckily that heavy air of the last part of the dialogue was wiped away.

When the woman left, Akashi turned toward the tanned man.

"Instead I heard you joined the police forces, Aomine." he said, calm, and Kuroko felt even more nervous at the use of last names. Not that it was strange, in truth: after the disappearance of the Emperor, the true Akashi took back that consuetude, but kept on calling him 'Tetsuya' since they were dating again. The teal-head wasn't sure about how he could react if he was called…in any of the two ways, to be honest. The first would have hurt him making clear the distance but the second would have broken him forcing him to do something to make sure Seijuro wouldn't look for him, then he couldn't chose for what to pay the gods.

He listened to only half the discussion between Aomine and Akashi and ate absent-mindedly while Kise talked about his model career and Murasakibara about how he and Himuro were keeping on working in their patisserie. When in the end they finished eating, Midorima was revealing his intention of specializing in obstetrics or paediatrics at the end of his course of general medicine.

"This is surprising." Akashi commented, strangely at least apparently not irritated for not predicting that scenario, blinking a bit, "I thought you found children irritating, Midorima."

Kuroko's eyes slipped discretely on the green-head, but the other was adjusting his glasses with his bandaged left hand and didn't notice. Or maybe he just pretended.

"Recently, some events made me change my mind." was the diplomatic answer of the green-head that made Akashi raised a scarlet eyebrow, but the red-head didn't pry any further.

Instead, he turned again toward Tetsuya.

"And you?" he asked, staring at him with seriousness, "What do you do now?"

" _You'll make a great kindergarten teacher, Tetsuya."_

" _Sei-kun, if you're making fun of me, I'll throw this pillow at your face using my Ignite Pass Kai."_

" _Even admitting that your threat is terrible, Tetsuya, I can assure you I'm not joking at all. I truly think it." Seijuro's smile was warm and welcoming like his arms, "After taking care of the whole Generation of Miracle, a bunch of children will be a cup of tea, for you."_

Kuroko gulped.

"I'm working part-time in a Butler Café." _And I'm a mother full-time._

Tetsuya lowered his eyes on his untouched dessert. He was sure never words had exited more painfully his mouth. After all of his comrades, so ready to get their amazing lives, the humiliation grew in his chest and mind, trying even to red his cheeks. And it was strange, because in front of others he had never felt like this – usless and a failure and shamefully desperate – but in front of Akashi… He wished he could have showed himself to him differently, stronger and worthier of his attention.

Seijuro stood silent while staring at him, as if waiting for something else, and when he finally understood that _something else_ really didn't exist, he seemed speechless for a second.

"I thought you wanted to…" he started, but the sudden ringing of Kuroko's phone made everybody jerk, breaking the tension.

Reading 'Himuro-san' on the display, Tetsuya grabbed immediately the object opening it and answering there, in front of everybody, before remembering that he couldn't talk about Seiji in front of Akashi.

"Sorry…" he quickly whispered, getting up and exiting almost running from the restaurant to talk freely.

He had just put foot on the sidewalk when Tatsuya's calm voice saying " _Kuroko-kun, first thing, don't agitate…_ " reached his ears, worrying him even more.

"What happened?!" he questioned anxiously, despite trying to keep his voice low. He knew he shouldn't have gone out, he shouldn't have left Seiji alone! To go to Seijuro, even!

The guilty trip grew overbearing in his chest, almost bringing tears to his eyes, even if he had no idea on what had happened.

" _Nothing! Nothing serious, Kuroko-kun, I swear!_ " the black-haired boy exclaimed from the other side of the phone, " _It's just that we went to check on Seiji and it seems that he has a bit of a fever so we thought it was better to tell you by voice, rather than with a text._ "

"…Fever." Tetsuya's hand raised involuntarily to his shirt and grabbed it right on the chest, right there where his heart was, in an attempt of erasing the flashes of pain accompanying his pulse. He gulped, trying to calm down. "How much?" he asked.

" _Not much,_ " Himuro answered immediately, " _but knowing you…_ "

Tetsuya nodded, even knowing that he couldn't be seen, and forced himself to take another deep breath.

"It's okay, we just finished eating." he assured passing a hand on his forehead, "I'll take my things and leave. I should be there in twenty minutes."

" _You don't have to do it, Kuro-…_ "

"Please." Tatsuya shut up, waiting, and thus he clearly heard the trembling in the teal-head's breath, "I'll be home in twenty minutes."

"… _Okay._ "

Kuroko nodded to himself, dethatching the phone from his ear and ending the call.

It was his fault, he knew from the very beginning that evening would be a disaster, but a part of him wanted to see Akashi again so much that his greediness turned bossy, instoppable, and he had gone all the same. And now his son was ill at home and without him.

He turned, determined to come back in and pick his things and leave and…he jerked backward when he found two big scarlet eyes waiting for him.

"Did I scare you?" Akashi askew slowly, a bitter smile on his lips and a hand instinctively stretched out to the teal-head's side as if scared he's fall, "Sorry, it wasn't my intention."

"No, no, this is my fault…" Tetsuya murmured, lowering his gaze to escape the other's. He held the phone to his chest and gulped another time. "I didn't realize you were here, I was caught in the call."

Seijuro nodded, but in the meanwhile he retracted the hand with which he didn't even dare to touch the other.

"Yes, I heard." he admitted, with not a crumble of shame, "Is your mother still ill?"

Kuroko brushed his forehead. Too many, too many things all together, and Seiji being ill…

"No, it's…" He bit his tongue just in time before saying the wrong thing, "…another person."

His last minute correction didn't go unnoticed to Seijuro and the red's smile turned painted in melancholy while his irises ran for cover under his eyelids. Before they managed to, however, Kuroko managed to read a vague suffering in their colour.

"This other person" the red-head murmured, "is the girl from three years ago, isn't she?"

For a moment, just one, Tetsuya was on the verge of ruining everything by asking 'What girl?', but luckily the lie from years before ran to his memory, humiliating in that moment like back then, and the azure-haired boy felt disgusting but used it again all the same.

"Yes." he answered, with not a minimal hesitation, striving to keep his eyes focused on Akashi's face even if he was keeping his closed.

To that word, he opened them, though.

"I know you wish to reach her, thus I promise you I'll be quick." he murmured and his low, soft voice had a sad note that forced Kuroko to keep silent and listen, instead of running to pick his things and than to Seiji like the voice in his head was suggesting in screams.

Seijuro hesitated for a moment and Tetsuya observed him taking a deep breath, closing his eyes, sighing again and then, finally, like a butterfly exiting his chrysalides, making a little smile bloom again on his lips and opening again his eyelids to show the two rubies through which he looked at the world and at the phantom in front of him.

When he heard the words exiting Akashi's lips, Kuroko knew something within his own soul was breaking again.

* * *

Tetsuya ran away along the street, without jacket or else. He didn't stop once, he barely payed attention to the traffic while crossing them, and for as much as Akashi stood there looking at him turning smaller and less focused, 'til vanishing from sighed, he didn't turned back.

Seijuro sighed.

"I recognize your effort," The red-head turned, meeting the emerald irises staring at him from high, but Midorima didn't stop, "but if you were hoping to get something, I'd be disappointed in your naivety, nanodayo."

Akashi smiled bitterly at that stating.

"I guess I should have expected being found out by you." he admitted, nodding as if it wasn't that big of a thing. "I tried." he continued, shrugging, "Do you want to blame me for this?"

Shintarou kept silent, not offering any answer.

Honestly, he was surprised the other didn't notice the clear goal behind Seijuro's odd behaviour, his being open, gentle, far too friendly him being him, and all the rest. The clothes particularly suiting him and the jacket Kuroko gave him with the fact that he wore cologne, thing he's never done, were clues more than evident for him, but Aomine, Kise and Murasakibara didn't seem to notice.

And for what Tetsuya just said to the red-head… Well, he could be justified. Midorima couldn't even imagine what was in the teal-head's mind. And despite that, who worried him the most in that moment was the very person standing in front of him.

In front of his friend's silence, Akashi sighed, but nodded.

"Don't worry, Midorima." he offered, like a sacrifice to some cruel deity, "I knew I couldn't expect much and I had already chosen that if I hadn't gotten any sign from him this evening, I would have retreated definitely. Surely I didn't expect this ending, but this doesn't really change anything. It doesn't happen often, but I can recognize when I lose."

Shintarou didn't feel like nodding nor doing anything. Kuroko had taken his decision, he chose to protect both Seiji and Seijuro by keeping them away one from the other, defending them from the same world and the same person, Akashi Seito, renouncing to part of his own happiness and he didn't have any right to interfere.

In the silence enveloping them after that last declaration, a black and clearly luxurious car stopped by the sidewalk and the chauffeur exiting it bowed to them before opening the passenger door, waiting.

Seijuro allowed himself a bitter 'tsk', but then overcame Midorima to reach the car.

"Tetsuya's things." he murmured, stopping for a second.

"I'll take care to bring them to him, nanodayo."

"You grew really close, another thing I didn't expect with your _recent_ choice of specialization."

Midorima stiffened, conscious of his mistake. In the moment Akashi spied on him from a corner of his eye, the green head knew the other was maybe connecting his renewed friendship to his words about becoming a paediatrician. Seijuro had always been too good in reading people.

"Takao and I moved in the apartment over his." he lied, "We see each other very often, so it's just logical for me to give him back his things, nanodayo."

Akashi said nothing for a long time and Shintarou didn't dare to add anything, scared of being found out. In the end, the red-head resumed his walking to the car.

"Until the next time." he greeted in a low voice, but when Shintarou found the courage to answer him, to answer that friend he was keeping the secret existence of a son from, the other was already gone.

* * *

When Takao heard the door getting opened and closed, he hurried up to it ready for who-knows how many anxious questions from a certain hyper-protective father, but surely not a Tetsuya with his back heavily laying against the door and his head lowered to the point that his hair were hiding the face.

Kazunari blinked, shocked, then Tetsuya trembled and he jerked.

"What happened?!" he exclaimed approaching the teal-head, putting and hand on his shoulder, but the other shook his head to buy some time.

Shocked, the black-haired guy bent his head to spy through the teal locks and what welcomed him were hot tears falling down the pale cheeks of Kuroko's face.

Mitobe and Himuro reached them in that moment, shocked too, just in time to hear Tetsuya whispering: "He said he forgives me… He said he _forgives me!_ "

" _I just wanted you to know that I'm forgiving you."_

" _Forgiving…?"_

" _For what happened while I was in America, for finding someone else." A smile of only lips, elegant with the eyelids closed, but bitter, bloomed on Akashi's mouth._ **No, please, no…** _"Even if 'forgiveness' is not the correct word, since you didn't really 'betray' me, nay you'd been really honest in telling me the truth before choosing her definitely." A warm gaze, kind, was everything Tetsuya registered when Seijuro's eyes found his._ **Please, what do you mean?** _"I just wanted to say that I'm not here to ruin your life or something similar. We were both wrong. I, among all, should have realized you needed me, despite all your words, and I should have stood when your mother fell ill."_ **Seijuro, please, no…** _"The worst thing is that I knew that leaving was the wrong decision, but I did it all the same and I left you alone when you needed me the most."_ **No, no, no! Don't say it, don't do it, please, no!** _"This is why I recognize it is my fault too for being selfish, even if it took me a while to realize and accept it."_ **No… No…** _"Thus, I would just like to ask you to at least keep on being friends. The bond I have with you is among the ones I cherish the most, it was even before it turned into a romantic one. It would be really sad for me to lose it."_ **Seijuro… Please, please, no…** _"Then? Kuroko?"_

"… _I'm sorry, Akashi-kun."_ **Why? Why did you have to force me in doing this too?!** _"Sadly, I can't see you as a friend anymore, after all that has been between us. You've been the first to me, when I was probably still too young to really understand what I was doing, but now that I'm in a relationship with a woman, the mere sight of you"_ **Forgive me.** _"is"_ **Forgive me.** _"disgusting."_ **Seijuro.**

 _Not a single hesitation, in the voice or on the face, but the heart in his chest squeezed painfully._

 _There was surprise, a lot of surprise, but even a lot of pain on Akashi's face and Kuroko had to turn his back on him not to throw himself at his feet begging for that same forgiveness he had just threw back in his face, only a second after receiving it, even if for the wrong reasons._

" _I understand." Seijuro murmured after a too long silence._

 _Tetsuya couldn't turn anymore, because he felt the tears already on his face._

" _I wish we could still be friend, but I can't." he lied and his voice, like a bad joke, sounded apathetic and indifferent while reciting that lie, "I'm sorry."_

 _Then he couldn't hold back anymore and started running._

Kuroko had just calmed down when the doorbell rang lowly, once.

The teal-head was sitting on the couch, near Mitobe and Himuro, so it was Takao who went to open it, since he was already on his feet, and honestly he wasn't that surprise to find Midorima.

He nodded.

"I grab my things and we can go…" he said, but the lowered his voice, "Was it really that awful?"

Shintarou shook his head.

"Kuroko had to make it such, nanodayo," he murmured, "and it broke him."

Kazunari didn't feel like prying further and turned to reach the kitchen while Midorima entered and approached the couch. Quickly, Mitobe and Himuro followed the third baby-sitter and the two ex-Miracles were left alone.

"What did he say?" Tetsuya asked slowly, the frail voice of a caged wounded bird, passing and hand on his face to erase the traces of tears from his cheeks.

Shintarou adjusted the glasses on his nose.

"That he was expecting your refusal, that he won't bother you anymore and that we seemed really close." For a moment, he frowned. "I don't think he'll try to investigate, but if he'll ever ask you, Takao and I moved here." Kuroko frowned too and Midorima snorted, "I needed an excuse to justify the fact that it was me and not that imbecile Aomine who brings you're your things."

"… Why should the two of you have done something like that? Didn't Akashi-kun get suspicious?"

Shintarou sighed again at that question, but approached the other and sat on the couch, near him.

"My mother…I wouldn't go to the extent of saying she's 'homophobic' but…she has difficulties in accepting me and Takao as a couple." he slowly explained, serious but without drama. "Trust me, she's striving, and a lot, at least to pretend it doesn't trouble her, just because she knows that I'm happy this way, but we know she's suffering for it so we avoid to show up often at my house. Takao's family lives in a minuscule apartment so we can't really stay there too. Akashi is a friend I truly respect and before he left, when he told me you wanted to start living together, I hinted about a possibility of us doing the same, given the situation."

Kuroko kept an apathetic, even if a bit reddened by the cry of a few before, expression, but kept silent for a long moment at that confession. Midorima snorted, fixing the glasses on his nose, and opened his mouth to tell him not to worry, but he was preceded.

"Do it for real." Shintarou frowned and, confused, turned to observe Tetsuya, but this one kept on nodding. "Come to live here." he explained calmly, just to raise and hand and stopped Midorima in the middle of his confused "Kuroko…?!" with an heavy sigh. "My parents were thinking about selling the upper apartment all the same because during winter sustain them both is too expensive, especially now that Seiju has begun school." Slowly, the teal-head stood up. "Up until now they didn't do it because the idea of having some strangers in the house made them worry," he explained slowly, "but if it was about Midorima-kun and Takao-kun…"

Kuroko didn't finish his sentence because Kazunari entered the room again and he felt like it was better to leave to Shintarou the duty of talking about the idea to his boyfriend, so that they could talk about it, but Midorima kept on eyeing him in disbelief for a bit.

"Kuroko…" he tried again to say, but Tetsuya was stubborn and interrupted him again.

"Midorima-kun and Takao-kun did a lot for us during these years. If we can help, nobody of us will back off." he whispered lowly but with determination, shaking his head, then, not waiting for an answer, he approached to door to accompany his hosts.

He greeted them all in a low voice, but Midorima shot him a glare clearing that their talk was far away from being concluded, then even the green-head slipped out the door closing to behind him.

The phantom sighed.

Silent as he'd always been, he slipped trough the living room and passed his own bedroom, stopping in front of Seiji's room. He opened it carefully, paying attention not to make any noise, and in a first moment he simply spied inside with his head.

The light blade from the corridor caressed slowly the bundle of blue blankets over a little occidental bed, posed with a side against the wall in front of the entrance, and Kuroko in spite of himself smiled a bit seeing this one lifting and lowering to the rhythm of a subtle breathing.

Always slowly, he entered and closed the door behind him, painting vaguely his face in bitterness while crossing the battlefield enlightened only by the moonlight coming in through the window on his left. Walking on the soft carpet, he stopped now and then to pick up a toy or a plush apparently fallen in action, conscious that his son made that kind of disaster only when ill, while he was usually observant of putting everything back to its place after using it, and in the end he finally reached the bed.

From the floor right beside the mattress, he picked carefully the plush of a lion puppy with honey coloured fur, big golden eyes and a torn up ear because of a fight with Nigou, and stopped for a moment to observe it. Kise, Momoi and Riko brought it to the hospital the day of father's and son's dismissal, as a present to celebrate Seiji's official arrival at home, and the boy turned out so attached to that thing that he never abandoned it. Unless it fell from the bed during the night.

With a new little smile, sweeter but always a bit melancholic, Tetsuya slipped the plush again under the sheets, within the clumsy hug of Seiji, who immediately held onto it, burying his face within its fur and whining sadly in his sleep.

"…Papa…" he called for a couple of times and the use of that childish nickname instead of the usual 'Otou-san' immediately defeated Tetsuya, who carefully overcame the little one to lay down beside him, against the wall.

Suddenly, feeling his mother's warmth, Seiji stopped lamenting and rolled to hide his face in his chest instead of the soulless plush. But he kept holding it.

Tetsuya giggled a bit, but laid his head on the pillow right above his son's one and stretched and arm to put it over his tiny body, earning a satisfied grumble as an answer. He slowly kissed his forehead, being careful not to wake him up, and in the meanwhile he thought again about Akashi, but this time in a different way.

With Seiji in his arms, he understood he could forget him again.

For as much as he had - and still - loved Seijuro – he thought caressing his son's hair – after seeing him so strong and realized and after hearing him talking about college and companies and the job he would have taken up soon, he could state his choice again.

Hiding his son's existence allowed him to become what he now was, a wonderful man, and thus, even if with a bitter taste in his mouth, Kuroko finally accepted, once for all, to renounce to him.

He bent forward and kissed his son's scarlet nape.

Saying the truth at that point, after three years, what good would have done? Akashi's father hadn't changed and wouldn't have forgiven his son for staining the family reputation: Seijuro would have lost everything all the same, nullifying every single day Tetsuya had spent alone, in the secret of a womb that shouldn't have carried any life but did it all the same and that the teal-head was thankful for. And how could he reveal everything now?, go to the red-head and telling him that great secret, telling him about _Seiji_ , about the labour, about those thirty-six long months he had stolen from them, _from Seijuro and his son_ , not allowing them to know each other? Akashi would have never forgiven him, nay he would have hated him undoubtedly and with reason – but because he was made like that, because he couldn't accept for someone to chose for and protect him – and at that point everything would have been only miserable, for him but for Seiji too, who would have known both his parents just to see them hating, even if not reciprocally.

No, to say the truth it was already too late, doing it would have only destroyed that frail equilibrium so difficultly built.

"We can make it by ourselves, can't we?" he whispered, barely audible, Kuroko lowering his gaze on the red head he was still caressing.

Seiji muttered something in his sleep, but all that Tetsuya managed to understand was the ending "…Papa…" that made him smile despite his dark thoughts.

It would have been okay, he was sure of it. He would have never seen Seijuro anymore, would have make that meeting and that cruel lies he said the last memories the one for the other and from there on he would have refused all the invites, pretending not to be home or to be busy; he would have avoided the other like a plague, preventing his heart from wavering and his mind from asking him questions he didn't want to know the answers to, putting again in danger the happiness of those two red-heads he would have sold his soul to hell and his organs to the black market for. Everything would have been okay.

Finally he closed his eyes to sleep beside that son he had by then and absolute need of.

* * *

Five months later, Seijuro became CEO of an Akashi Group foreign bank branch and moved to London, Great Britain, permanently.


	4. Chapter III

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

* * *

 _ **Chapter III**_

* * *

"Are you ready?"

Kuroko didn't need to see his son to know he was rolling his eyes. His exasperated heavy snort was a pretty clear hint.

"For the fifth time, yes." in fact answered the guy, but without turning – again, for the fifth time – to shoot his father a warning glare. He had already learnt how useless it would have been.

Tetsuya smiled a bit, drying his hands with the towel he brought from the kitchen – a little gesture betraying his uneasiness –, and observed the fifteen-year-old boy closing his journey bag and putting it on his shoulder – with an unbelievable grace for an adolescent – and finally turning toward his father who was laying against the door jamb with a side.

Seiji raised his scarlet right eyebrow, making the red iris even brighter, and approached the teal-head who, even if clearly with disappointment, moved from the door to let him pass.

Tetsuya's scepticism was clear even from under his apathetic mask so the guy sighed, almost trotting along his father toward the kitchen.

"You know I'm not going to war, don't you, mom?" he asked, offhandedly using the feminine epithet for the teal-head who on his part, working around the fires, paid it little attention. Seiji had begun using that word since the very day he discovered his father gave him birth and making him stop that habit of his was already impossible. Not that Kuroko felt offended, to be honest.

"Kyoto is a big city." he objected all the same, grabbing the dish with the just finished onigiri and turning to put it on the counter and start putting them into a travel food holder.

"So is Tokyo." Seiji reminded him smartly, stealing a rice ball before his dad could stop him.

"But here there are me, the grannies and all the uncles." Tetsuya retorted, stretching out to hit with a useless little slap his son's nape.

"Last time I asked uncle Taiga for directions I ended up in Kabukichou." was the boy's dare while he pretended to massage his head.

Kuroko shot him an emotionless gaze.

"Nobody asks uncle Taiga for directions, Seiji, and there's a reason for this." He frowned, "And stop nominating that place, please."

Seiji laughed a little, lying against the counter with his crossed arms. He still had his bag on his back, but he didn't seem to mind at all and Kuroko smiled, thinking that luckily his son didn't seem to have inherited his lack of stamina and strength.

"Mom, it isn't a foul word and I ended up there just by mistake." The guy's facial traits softened when he bent forward to kiss his _mother_ 's cheek, with all the expansiveness Kagami's and Himuro's presences and their Americanism transmitted him by osmosis. "You're the only woman of my life."

"Baka." Tetsuya sighed, jokingly avoiding him, but in the end he smiled and offered his son the holder with his just assembled packed lunch.

The other laughed, laying the bag on the lunch table over the counter to add the last piece, and Kuroko stopped to observe him.

By then, the 'little baby' was no more little nor a baby. Seiji was taller than Tetsuya himself, even if maybe not yet as Seijuro, and on his thin and slender body he could proudly show subtle muscles darting to each movement under the pale, almost candid, skin. He wore blue-jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt of the same red of his hair, that he was now wearing short but with a long fringe on his face covering the left iris and its teal colour, leaving instead opened the right one.

" _I want it to be my secret._ " he had told Tetsuya after asking for that cut to his uncle Junpei, " _I want to be the one who chooses who can and who can't see it. It's my mother's eye, it's important to me._ "

His facial traits had turned refined, elegant like Seijuro's, but if his face and the eyes shape were certainly like his father, the lips and the defined frame of the eyebrows were definitely his mother's. To conclude, he was handsome and magnetic like the sin of lust itself and the mere idea of what could have happened to him alone in another city had kept Tetsuya awake for the whole last month, since when his son asked his permission to study in Kyoto. In front of his hesitant gaze and worried – for his reaction – expression, Kuroko couldn't bring himself to refuse, but he regretted his choice already three seconds after giving his answer.

The doorbell ring made them both raised their head toward the entrance, but it was Seiji who, with a huge smile, ran to let the guests in.

Tetsuya sighed, simply cleaning the kitchen because he was already conscious of their identities.

The day before, in the morning Momoi and Riko passed to greet the leaving boy; they had Hyuuga, Teppei, Mitobe and Kagami at lunch – the latter as the real chef – and in the afternoon Aomine and Kise hand in hand took away a couple of hours from their anniversary – ten years as a real couple – the one to give his useless advices and the other to cry crocodile tears on his nephew's neck. Murasakibara and Himuro had just left after bringing as a present a huge box full of cookies - the half of which was already stuffed into the bag as 'journey supplies' – and during their visit had come even the call from Sakura and Haru. This all left little space to imagine who were the last on the list.

Midorima entered the kitchen leaving behind Seiji's and Takao's laughter – and they surely had done, or were up to, something – and put his hands on the counter to observe Kuroko cleaning.

"Long travels are advised against for cervical, nanodayo." he suddenly grumbled, out of thin air, "They're not good for kids. Not that I care, nanodayo."

"If you manage to make him change his mind, Midorima-kun, I'll may consider the idea of following Oha-Asa." Kuroko apathetically answered, keeping on his job, but before the green-head could say anything two exuberant hurricanes entered the room.

"Tecchan, we're ready!" Takao exclaimed, waving his car's keys, "You sure you don't want to come with us?"

Tetsuya smiled seeing the euphoric light in the eyes of his son, currently blocked under the black-head's arm, and nodded.

"I have to be at work in fifteen minutes." he murmured, for the umpteenth time flashing his son a saddened gaze, but the boy answered him with an encouraging smile.

"It doesn't matter, mom." he lovely assured, before opening into an evil smirk that reminded Tetsuya a lot, maybe too much, of Seijuro, "You'd just began crying and begging me not to leave anyway, so maybe it's better like this."

Both Seiji and Takao laughed when Kuroko threw the first thing he had in his hand-reach – luckily just a potholder – to his son's head, proving how his aim hadn't lowered despite the years away from basketball.

"Out of here." he muttered, but it was clear that he didn't mean it minimally, thus Seiji tool the weapon he just received and slipped out of his uncle's grip to return it to his father and, in the meanwhile, stealing a hug from him, knowing that the rigid Japanese etiquette and the need to be a good example were the only things holding the teal-head back from doing the same.

"I love you mom." he whispered and Kuroko couldn't help but holding him tightly repeating to himself that locking his son in his room for his whole life _was not_ that good of idea as it may seem in that moment.

"Be careful, please." he had to at least beg for. He didn't want to keep Seiji closed in the house – as he practically had done during his first year of life – but he was scared endless at the idea of not having him around anymore.

Seiji's laughter sounded crystalline in his ears.

"I won't follow any of uncle Daiki's advices, I'll trust uncle Taiga only for food, I won't tell anybody I know uncle Ryouta, I won't exaggerate with uncle Atsushi's cookies and I'll watch Oha-Asa every morning." the boy joked while pulling back, "Happy?"

"Forget Oha-Asa, please."

"Ohi!"

Takao's laughter was so loud that it filled the whole house.

* * *

Seiji waited for his father to watch attentively before tying his seatbelt and he rolled his eyes when he noticed him nodding.

"Tecchan often exaggerated, but we have to be patient with him." Takao commented with fake indifference, bending over him to rapidly wave Tetsuya and Shintarou – on the doorsteps – off through the window, "His main problem is that he loves you a lot."

"I know." the red-head assured, spying on his father while his dad gave gas to the car.

Kuroko smiled to him, one of his rare stars-bright smiles, big and welcoming, only him had the right to see at his own pleasure, and Seiji had to hold back from laying against the car window to keep on seeing it until the very last second before they turned. He was strong and didn't do it, but he let himself fell heavily against the car seat and as soon as the house vanished he allowed his enthusiastic expression to fall into an apathetic one and to his heterochromatic eyes to slip on the background running out of the glass.

Houses, streets and shops that he knew like himself and through which he had grown up trying to impress every single detail in his brain like his father always easily did…everything was vanishing so quickly, leaving place to sceneries always less familiar, but Seiji cared only a little because his mind was fixed on those two sentences exchanged with his uncle Kazunari a few before.

He knew it, from a long time, how much is father loved him. Since when he was eleven and, woken up during night-time, had heard him talking with his uncle Shintarou and thought it would have been funny to play a prank on them, appearing suddenly in the kitchen.

" _This is nothing to joke about, Kuroko, nanodayo."_

" _I have never had any sense of humour, Midorima-kun, you know it. I'm definitely not joking."_

" _Your check-up results aren't good, Kuroko. Your heart worsened again, not like the other times but only by a few and I've already told you that the possibilities for you to survive another heart-attack are really low. A transplant…"_

" _A transplant costs, Midorima-kun, and far too much for me to afford it. I've been going on with this heart for twenty-nine years, it will last for some more."_

" _It's not even thinkable with the shifts you're doing now, nanodayo."_

" _The shifts I'm doing now pay for Seiji's school, Midorima-kun."_

" _They'll kill you."_

" _You can't know."_

"…"

"…"

" _Kuroko, of only you asked…"_

" _No. Don't feel offended, Midorima-kun, but I don't want your or anyone of others' charity. I can do it on my own, Seiji needs me."_

" _Seiji needs_ you _, not your pride, nanodayo."_

" _Midorima-kun, enough. I'm already a burdend for the all of you, I won't be for my son too."_

"…"

"…"

" _To…Seijuro…, you weren't a burden."_

" _That's because I left him on time, before turning into one."_

Seiji closed his eyes, chasing that scene out of his mind.

Yes, he definitely knew how much his father loved him. Takao had said _a lot_ , but he was more for _too much._

* * *

"Alright!" Kazunari exclaimed, smiling on the station quay when the train stopped there and a door opened just two steps from them, "I guess I should give you some recommendation, but I'd bet your father already gave you enough, uh?"

The only answer from Seiji, while he adjusted the travel-bag on his shoulder and pulled out the ticked from his pocket, was an eloquent look and it was enough for Takao to laugh.

"Try to find some time to have fun, too!" the man said, patting his shoulder.

"I'll do my best!" the red-head retorted, with a smile, climbing the steps, "Keep an eye out for dad and uncle Shin-chan in my place."

Kazunari made a military salute while the door were already closing and Seiji smiled, before reaching for his seat. He found out he was into an empty compartment and, place his bag, he sat beside the window and took a deep breath.

 _Rakuzan High School, I'm coming._ , he thought, determined.

* * *

Kyoto was huge, but Seiji was smart and used to attentively observe, to think, to put things together and find solutions. His natural attitude inherited from his father, the training with a chaotic group of uncles and a QI enough over the average gave him a notable adaptability that allowed him to adequate to the new city with an unbelievable speed, to the point that just two months after the beginning of his first years of high school in the famous Rakuzan school, the young Kuroko had already a letter of recommendation from the school for a job in an important multinational.

It was nothing too complex, in the job description he was mostly asked to make some errands and do photocopies here and there, but he was allowed to assist to the workers job, to learn to organize his time and to have a contact with the world of adulthood. Moreover, it was the most paid part-time job that accepted under-aged guys in the whole city.

The company had asked the school for a good student, Seiji had taken part to the contest and he placed first with full-result leaving behind of some tens the third-year placed second. Thus, he found himself, in that very second, in front of the doors of the huge glass skyscraper that was the administrative centre of various and different branches of the same company.

While reading absentmindedly the plates near the entrance – more to get an idea than for real interest – he spotted the directive base of a publishing house, a bank society, two agricultural companies, an insurance society and two sport articles important marks.

 _Boasters._ , he mentally decided, but then shrugged. He wasn't there to judge, just to be used like a little slave or a court pageboy, for the next three years of his life in exchange of a compensation that would have hopefully lightened a bit the pressure on his father's heart.

Like every time that thought touched his mind, he slipped an hand in the jeans pocket and held tightly his cell-phone, tempted of calling to know how was the poor hyper-protective soul of his father without his beloved son, but he forced himself not to. In the two passed months, coming home in the weekends, he had managed to built an equilibrium that allowed his father to calm down a bit, but still calls with no reason and/or at strange times still made Kuroko-san's pulse go wild, threatening his safeness if considered his heart problems, and as such were to be avoided.

Striving not to become as paranoid as Tetsuya, Seiji approached the door, waited for it to open and entered with no hesitation, with his head held high and showing absolutely no emotions, just an empty face.

 _Don't let anyone watch you from high downward, there's not a single person in this world with the right to do such._ , was just one of the numerous advices received from his father, but it was one he held very dear, thus he reached the counter of a reception-simile not caring about the curious gazes of the workers staring at his black sneakers, his white shirt with a black gilet and most of all at his trumpery fire red hair. Only one thing, he took care to have his left eye well covered, hiding his cerulean shade, before talking to the secretary sitting at the computer.

"I apologize, I'm Kuroko Seiji, from Rakuzan High School." he greeted, serious, with a polite bow, before declaring in a completely apathetic voice, "I'm the winner of the contest for the stage here at the **Akashi Group**."

* * *

"Oh, Kuroko-kun, maybe have you already di the photocopies…"

"On your desk, Tachibana-san, beside the computer."

"Kuroko-kun, the report…"

"…of the counts for the third group. I already brought it to the economy department. They thank you and Sou-san says he'll pass by within three days to give you the signed and authorized copy, Takahashi-san."

"Kuroko-kun…"

"A macchiato with three sugar cubes. You know I'm not authorized to bring it, Watanabe-san, because of your last medical check-up. I left an energetic drink near the photocopies of the waiver for yesterday interview, I pray you to sign them the sooner possible."

Watanabe Shou blinked a couple of times at that completely apathetic answer and observed open-mouthed the fifteen-year-old guy that, eyes and hair red and emotionless face, slipped like air through the desk of the floor, leaving papers, orders and answers with the same indifference of someone scribbling during a boring phone call.

The scariest thing was that, looking beside his computer, the man really found both the drink and the documents. But when he lifted his eyes to look for the boy, he was already disappeared within the elevator, toward who knows what floor.

"If it wasn't for that hair of his, I think I wouldn't even notice him when he passes." Takahashi Yuuto commented staring at the close doors of the elevator, "He's almost alarming, he _never_ makes mistakes."

"And he does even more than what he should." Tachibana Kaito added, approaching his colleagues, "I wonder how does he study and keep that absurd marks he has, even working more than what originally decided."

"Come on, he's kind at least." Watanabe intervened, interrupting the incredulous conversation of the others.

"Yes, yes, not a complain!" Takahashi hurried up in commenting, "But you have to admit that…he's a bit weird. I've never seen him…smiling or…have any expression! He's completely apathetic!"

"He must be one of those persons who are born old." Tachibana joked, but smiling, "Who knows, maybe he's like this only here and outside from work he's a scapegrace."

"Who's a scapegrace?"

The three men suddenly turned, surprised by the emotionless voice calling out for them, just to meet a tall men, perfect in his blue suit with grey necktie, in the middle of his thirties with white hair tied in a short ponytail to his shoulders and apathetic grey eyes, pale skin and lack of presence.

"Oh, it's you, Mayuzumi-san." Watanabe sighed, "You scared us as always."

"Not my fault you're easily distracted." Chihiro answered back with a snort, reaching them with his folder under an arm, then his irises ran to the elevator object of such interest, "What was the topic of your conversation, this time?"

"Rakuzan's intern." Tachibana explained, making a gesture with his head, "Kuroko Seiji."

For a moment there was silence, absolute and heavy, then Mayuzumi allowed himself to raise an eyebrow, but just a little.

"…Kuroko-kun?" he asked, to confirm, and all the three men, even if confused, nodded.

 _May he be related to…?_ , Chihiro frowned but kept silent.

He'd never been one to hasty conjectures and he appreciated complex plots only in books, surely not when they ruined his perfect and organized real life, so, for the first time since when he worked for that agency, he shocked everybody by leaving his folder with the great boss appointment to a secretary passing by there, ordering her to bring it immediately to Mibuchi-san. Then, marching he approached the famous elevator and pushed the button to call it with the same force of an angry man crushing a cockroach.

As the numbers ran above his head, his forehead frowned even more.

If that Kuroko-kun was even just slightly connected with _that other_ Kuroko-kun, he would have had to re-organize completely his plans to avoid facing a depressed, irritated and dangerous boss.

* * *

Seiji ignored the confused muttering of the umpteenth group of secretaries and passed, completely unnoticed, in between two workers of the bank busy talking, leaving on the pile of documents in their hands the photocopies they asked for just a while before.

Normally, he avoided doing things like that – his father always told him that it was impolite to scare people, even if uncle Taiga and uncle Daiki were exceptions to the rule – but he was fifteen minutes late because of a fault at the coffee machine – that _he_ had to repair thanking mentally uncle Teppei's ability with mechanic things and the hours spent looking at him repairing that jalopy of their television – and he still had to finish a biochemistry essay for the following day so he really had no time to waste.

Luckily he was already at the first floor, so it was enough for him to reach the end of the corridor and turn left to find the hanger with his school-marked jacket and the bagwith his books, to study during breaks and on the bus. After the first week he had learnt that bringing books with him and giving up in changing his uniform into casual clothes was necessary steps to keep those perfect marks he needed, so he had resigned to walk around the office with the elegant black trousers and shoes, the grey shirt and the black tie. The whole thing made him so similar to a real worker that more than once some clients stopped him to ask for information. Watanabe, Tachibana and Takahashi reacted with surprise at the discovering that he had been able to answer perfectly every time.

Shrugging with himself, he wore his jacket and bent to pick his bag.

Something, a barely visible movement at his back, caught his attention but he didn't stop nor hesitate, pretending he didn't noticed. When he turned and found in front of himself a tall man with long grey hair staring at his as if he wanted to rip his soul out, he didn't even blink.

"Good evening, Mayuzumi-san." he simply greeted, apathetical but with a polite bow.

Chihiro lifted an eyebrow.

"I don't think we've ever meet." he commented, ignoring the etiquette, "Do we know each other?"

Again, Seiji didn't blink.

"Everybody knows the personal assistant of this place's CEO, sir. From this depends half of the contracts within this building." he simply retorted, adjusting the shoulder-belt on, "If there's nothing, I should be at school before the curfew."

Chihiro moved aside with not a single word and let the boy passed over him with a cold greeting before heading for the exit in silence. When he was finally vanisched, the grey-head allowed himself to throw out the breath he had kept until then.

 _He's…identical!_ , but it couldn't be. Hair, irises, face traits, height, aura, the way to lift his chin and the voice tone, everything was absolutely identical to Seijuro when he was fifteen! Even the age matched with… _Don't be ridiculous!_ , he scolded himself, shaking his head, _It's not possible, Akashi and Kuroko are both males! Stupid, how could something like this happen?!_

It was to admit that with Generation of Miracles often everything was possible, but…

Chihiro sighed heavily.

He was not paid to worry about his ex-captain personal problems, he just had to organize appointments and make sure his boss didn't skip them. Stop, he didn't sign for anything else and anything else he would have done. Full stop.

* * *

"Where is Kuroko-kun"?

Seiji retained the impulse to roll his eyes when hearing someone calling him while he was still doing the photocopies for others, but instead, emotionless, he turned to look for the voice, not really known but effectively already heard, that had evoked him with a bored-almost-irritated tone.

It wasn't that big of a surprise meeting Mayuzumi Chihiro's grey gaze. The man was flawless in his suit and that inflexion of voice was typical of him, but to be honest it was not normal to see him at the second floor – when he practically _lived_ at the last one – and asking for the intern of the time. Usually, _he_ was the one paid to do photocopies and bring coffee to _his_ boss.

But Tetsuya had taught his son that sometimes you just need to let things go their way, so Seiji simply answered with an "I'm here." while approaching Watanabe to give him his papers.

Mayuzumi stared at him with unreadable expression, but Seiji sustained his gaze with no cracks on his perfect façade. For a moment there was silence, but in the end, surprising everybody, Chihiro gave the boy a big glass of smoking coffee.

Kuroko kept on staring at him even while taking the thing.

"Bring it to the great boss, last floor; I have matters to take care of." the grey head muttered already reaching the elevator, uncaring of the eyes of the boy on his back.

When the doors finally closed, Chihiro banged his forehead against them.

He was sure he was too generous for his own good, with those disgraces of his ex-kohai.

* * *

Seiji was not stupid, but even if he were it would have been a little impossible not to realize the strangeness in Mayuzumi's behaviour.

First of all, that man never delegated his precious work to others; in second place, if he had free time he read, he didn't 'take care of matters'; and in the end, what kind of imbecile of a personal assistant gave his duties to a fifteen-year-old intern?! A coffee was just a coffee, but it was about allowing access to the last floor to a kid!

Said kid _thought_ about all those things, but then shrugged and pushed the button in the elevator considering the idea of getting his address there, then patiently waited with the coffee in his hands.

He wasn't anxious; the idea of meeting the great boss didn't bother him in the slightest. He was there merely for the money, he didn't care about learn or ensuring an occupation for when he would be done with his studies. To be honest, he didn't have the littlest intention of staying in Kyoto, after school; nay he would immediately come back to Tokyo, the sooner possible: the only reason he accepted to attend Rakuzan was that the school, to ensure his brain, had offered him a scholarship covering even food, rent, transports and books, over the normal school fees. For as much as Seiji dreamt about attending Seirin school near his home, where his father already had left his mark in the basketball club, the possibility of taking down his dad's shoulder almost all the expenses for his maintenance was too good for him to refuse.

As a matter of fact, however, the red-head was in that city not for his own happiness and felt no need to curry favour with anyone, so the boss behind that black door in front of him at the opening of the elevator made him feel not the slightest restlessness. If anything, the person at the desk in front of the door did it.

Not because of the waist-long black hair or the red nail polish, nor because of the skin-tight dress and the high heels clearly visible under his workstation, not even for the mesmerizing green eyes or for the soft lips, not for the kilometrical legs nor for the grace embodied on the way they were crossed. Honestly, it was not even because of the fact that, over the absolute perfection of the disguise, Seiji's trained eye had already found out that woman so gorgeous that she could make a top-model to shame was, _at least_ , born as a man.

Truly, she being a transsexual or a transvestite didn't bother Seiji, mostly because he was raised with two gay couples – Aomine and Kise as much as Midorima and Takao – and a lesbian one – his uncle Satsuki was dating the older Alexandra Garcia since years – and because his own father was homosexual, but the way that person widened his eyes, opened the mouth and let the pen in his hands fell the very second she saw him made him fella a little uneasy, even if he didn't show it clearly.

In the whole time that took him to walk the corridor, the woman kept on gasping with her emerald irises fixed on him, as if he was a ghost. For a moment he wondered why, but then he decided he didn't care; he just wanted to deliver the coffee and come back to Takahashi-san's photocopies.

"Mayuzumi-san asked me to deliver this to the boss." he then said emotionlessly, without even feeling embarrassed for neither knowing his employer's name, and offered the coffee to the secretary, "Could you please bring it to him?"

The sentence seemed to shock the black-head out of her trance, because she jumped to her feet shaking her head.

"Oh, no, no!" she exclaimed, opening in a far faker smile than her disguise, and before Seiji could open his mouth he found himself pushed toward the door. He wanted to object but he got distracted by the fact that the woman on her heels was probably taller than two metres and, irritated by his own height, he lost the occasion because she resumed her ceaseless talking, "You've come this far, at least let the boss see you!"

 _I'm not particularly interested and however I took the elevator._ , he thought to say, but the woman had already opened one of the doors and was pushing him inside. He barely managed to blink and look forward.

The office he was in was big and shiny, with all the walls made of glass and elegant dark blue marble on the floor bringing toward a big lucid desk, black it too, on which stood a pc, a lamp, organized papers and a vase with red, yellow, orange, so coloured and 'exuberant' flowers that they immediately made you think they'd been made by someone else other than the owner of the office, maybe the secretary. But that all, even the flowers, didn't catch the boy's attention as much as the man sitting over the computer, reading attentively the documents on a folder really similar to Mayuzumi's.

Kuroko-chan himself, with his whole indifference toward whoever out of his family, widened his eyes for a second, only one, while laying his gaze on the middle-length hair, in a fiery fire red, and on the scarlet subtle irises, almost feline, at all hidden by the rectangular lens of the glasses with a red structure; on the little nose and the cheeks form, the pale lips and the sharp chin, the large shoulders, the average-height body somewhat slender and muscled under the black jacket and the candid shirt with a pitchy necktie and ivory handkerchief in the chest-pocket.

Somewhere within his apathetical chest, Seiji's heart missed a beat.

 _It can't be…_ , he confusedly thought and he almost let the coffee fell on the ground.

The minima slipping of the glass in his hands awakened him from his stupor, putting his amazing brain neurons at motion all together at the same time, focusing each one of them on the single question: _What should I do?!_

The secretary's voice behind him cut his time short.

"Sei-chan, for you!" she yelled, before quickly shutting the door and vanishing.

* * *

"Sei-chan, for you!"

In hearing Reo's honey voice, Akashi Seijuro sighed heavily and wondered for the umpteenth time _why_ he had chosen to assume his ex-teammate as his secretary.

A voice in his head reminded him that he did it because Mibuchi turned out to be the best among all the ones he offered the job to and then that he didn't deserve to have his boss' anger for the bureaucracy vented on, especially when he had already had to suffer for too long the one of a disgusting selfish boyfriend. The bastard even pushed him to have his gender changed into a female. Akashi was sure that it was a good thing that they broke up, but it would have been better if it had happened _before_ the actual surgery. Reo never talked about it and went on with his new body as if it was nothing, always cheerful and exuberant, but the red-head doubted he would have made such a choice if it wasn't for the other.

Be as it was, Seijuro took a deep breath and took of the reading glasses – turned necessary after the Emperor's vanishing –, then he forced himself to keep calm not to contemplate again the idea of hunting down the damn man and finally he raised his eyes on Reo to see what he wanted.

Only, in front of his desk wasn't Reo, but a kid. A kid unbelievably, impossibly, disturbingly similar to him, but apparently immune to their similarity because he was absolutely deadpanned.

"Your coffee, sir." he simply said, his voice completely empty of intonation, while he left softly, hinting a respectful bow, a plastic glass on his desk.

Akashi shook out of his trance and faked indifference like the young.

"Thank you." he nodded, taking the glass and bringing it to the lips but without averting his eyes from the guy, letting him know he still wasn't allowed to leave. After a sip and a moment to cool his head down, he continued. "And who may you be?"

The boy stood impassive, but hesitated a second before answering.

"Kuroko Seiji, sir." he admitted at the end, always emotionless, "I'm working here as an intern."

Akashi drank again, to hide the shock.

 _Kuroko._ How was it even possible? Was it maybe a case of homonymy?, certainly it could have been. But on the other hand, Tetsuya had married a woman, he could even had had a son with her and the apathy, the lip's shape, the pale tone of the skin and the face shape let guess a slight similarity with the teal-head. Maybe his wife had red hair and so…

The boy kept on staring at Seijuro straight in the eyes and he realized he had to answer something.

"Oh, I remember…" he lied in part and in part said honestly. Mayuzumi hinted to him about the Rakuzan intern just the afternoon before and he obviously remembered the contest, but he had never bothered with checking the chosen one's name, due to the too much appointments. "You're almost a mascot here, aren't you?" he asked, striving to sound indifferent despite the turmoil in his thoughts, "They told me a lot about your hard work and your school tells wonders about your smartness."

Seiji didn't seem touched by those words, he kept absolutely unreadable, right like – Akashi was sure – Tetsuya would have done.

"I'm flattered, sir, but there's no really much of an hard work or smartness to praise in bringing things from a floor to another." he indeed replied, defensive but polite, and Akashi found himself lifting a corner of his mouth.

"Wise." he commented satisfied, then nodded, more to his own mind's decision than to the boy in front of his eyes, "Well, I'm letting you go back to your work."

Seiji bowed and turned to leave, maybe too fast, but Akashi stopped him before he could open the door.

"Kuroko-kun" he frowned, "may I know your father's first name?"

For a moment there was silence, absolute and penetrating, while Seiji stared right through Seijuro's eyes and a glint of warning, as if he suddenly was on guard, lightened in his irises.

"I don't deem it relevant for my permanence here, sir." he finally answered, just a bit threatening in his apathetical voice, "Please, refrain from asking again. Have a nice day."

Another bow and in a second the boy was out of the door, leaving Akashi with not a chance to talk back.

Seijuro blinked a couple of times.

 _That's how it is, uh?_ , he thought, vaguely satisfied for that challenge, and his hand ran almost of its own volition to the phone at his right, dialing an internal numer.

Reo's voice didn't make him wait.

" _Then, Sei-chan?!_ "

"Discover everything you can about him."

"… _Connections with the Kuroko-chan I'm thinking about included?_ "

"Obviously."

* * *

As soon as the elevator doors closed, Seiji threw out the breath he had held for the whole time and for barely a few he didn't fell on his knees, but just because he managed to cling to the wall in front of him. The free hand ran to his chest, grabbing the shirt right above the point where he could feel his heart beating like crazy, rhythm-less and painful. He gritted his teeth ad closed his eyes, as if prey of a physical immense pain.

In a second, as it was born, everything ended. Seiji relaxed his muscles one by one, slowly, and regained a normal breathing, but kept his hand pressed on his chest. He had learnt with time that, differently from Tetsuya, he wasn't able to keep his emotions bottled up constantly, but that he needed to let them out sometime, like a pressure cooker, and when that happened he tried not to let anyone see, especially his father.

 _Father._ But Tetsuya wasn't his father, at least not strictly. Biologically speaking, it was maybe truly more correct to say he was his _mother._ But then… who was his father?

Seiji confusedly remembered the few conversations he had heard about that mysterious – for him – man, flashes of dialogues stolen from others and an expression, burned in the back of his mind, of Kuroko with eyes suddenly…empty – and not apathetical, but empty, as if they used to bring something before that now had been ripped away from them – and his face shaped by an indescribable sadness.

Seiji had never missed his other parent, he had always been content with the father he had and the endless bunch of uncles and aunts he shared not a single blood-drop with without any of them caring about it. To better say, he had never wanted to know anything about the man who lent his semen for his birth: to him, he was just a synonym of abandonment, sadness and financial issues that almost killed his father with an heart attack, for as much senseless as it may seemed.

 _His father._

A breath and his body straightened, another and his hand left the grip on his shirt, to his third his face returned apathetical and to the fourth his eyes hid their lights completely. Seiji was again absolutely impossible to read when he turned to see the doors opening on the fourth floor.

With not a single word he exited the elevator and resumed his job.

 _His father_ was Kuroko Tetsuya and nobody else. He had no other parents and he didn't need them anyway. He, Kuroko Seiji, had everything he could wish for.

He didn't need anything else and even if that _else_ had shown up on his path, he would have ignored it and kept on walking pretending nothing.

* * *

Akashi let his gaze wander a bit on the sharp and cutting line of the city skyline, made of blacks and whites, of dense shadows and bright lights, with no middle grounds. That night sight had always been the only thing able to ease a bit the fatigue of working 'til midnight, but in that occasion the red-head felt no comfort from it, even if he didn't feel the usual tiredness either.

 _Kuroko had a son._ The possibilities of it being just a huge misunderstanding were there, but in his heart Seijuro had already recognized every single trait in common between father and son and felt that bound, it existed, it was not just an homonymy matter.

 _Kuroko had a son from a woman._ That certainty was strong in Seijuro's mind, natural like air and the fact that to make a child are needed both a man and a woman.

 _Kuroko had a son with someone else._ It hurt to think. Almost sixteen years passed since when the two of them broke up, eleven since when Tetsuya had said straight to his face how disgusted he was from the idea of having been with a man and, consequently, from him; and yet that refusal didn't hurt _so much_. Sure, it hadn't been like walking on a roses carpet, but it didn't even burn like scorching charcoals pushed down his throat, it didn't crushed him like a roadroller, it didn't flay him alive just to make him wear his turned-inside-out skin again and force him to keep on going for long hard hours with nobody noticing his change.

 _Kuroko's son looks like me,_ _a lot_ _._ , Seijuro wasn't sure about how to catalogue this last fact. On ne hand, the most probable thing was that the mother was somehow similar to him, but that scenario only increased the red-head's pain: had he been left…for a copy of himself just provided with breasts and vagina?, really? He didn't want to believe it, it was probably the worst thing in tat whole situation, but what other explanation was there to choose? For as much as the idea, _the fantasy_ , made him feel strange in a good way, as if enwrapped in a wool sweater during winter or hidden under a blanket hugging his lover during a storm night, he was aware of the impossibility of his dream of the boy to be his.

 _Kuroko had a son right after our breaking up._ For the times to coincide vaguely didn't mean anything, if not that Tetsuya made a girl pregnant in the period right after or – but Akashi refused that idea completely knowing the phantom's integrity – _before_ their separation. A part of Seijuro wanted to read in those times the explanation to Tetsuya's choice of going away from him, it wanted to believe that the girl was just…a mistake, he was willing to accept it, just to illusion himself that the teal-head chose to back off from their plans together just for a sense of duty toward the conceived child. Another part of him, the one that knew Kuroko would have never cheated on him, felt exhausted, crushed by the thought of the teal-head having a son with the woman he gave up on all his previous dreams for, just a few months after leaving him.

 _Akashi has headache._

Seijuro sighed, tired from all those difficult thoughts, but he suddenly turned, energetic again, when his office door opened and the soft tingling on heels on marble covered the sound of his brain melting.

Reo gave him a sad comprehensive smile. He was wearing an elegant black dress with three-quarter sleeves and knee-long, and had his long her falling untied on his back. His still a bit masculine traits had been artfully hidden with make-up and the lips were underlined by a dense dark lipstick, in between purple and brown, while on his eyelids was laying a smoky eyeshade that made his green irises stood out. He was mesmerizing, but Akashi kept on feeling a sort of painful spurt in a corner of his soul every time he saw him like _that._

If only he had the certainty that the other was happy in that new body, he would have accepted it, but knowing the whole story prevented him from feeling at ease with that transformation.

"Did you find anything?" he asked, turning his armchair to face his friend.

Reo nodded, but kept silent. Surprising Akashi, he sat on a chair on the other side of the desk and sighed adjusting the papers in his hands.

"Do you know, Sei-chan?" he slowly murmured, finally finding the resolution to pass all the documents to the red-head, "The more I red about him and the more he reminded me of you, somehow."

Akashi took the papers, but didn't move his eyes from his friend. He didn't even look at those things, he simply laid them down in front of him almost mechanically, and waited for Mibuchi to choose the words to explain what he had found out and why did he feel like that.

"Is he his son?" he just asked.

Reo kept silent, but nodded.

Akashi's world stopped for a long moment, breaking him, but then he resumed breathing. He was expecting it, so he could move on, even if it hurt far more that what he thought.

The black-head sighed, probably guessing his friend's feeling. He made the effort to straighten up and opened his eyes again, clearly trying to look less melancholic, than clapped his hands once.

"Let's make it short." he declared with seriousness, "Kuroko Seiji, fifteen years. He's attending the first year in Rakuzan thanks to a special scholarship for his amazing smartness, but in truth he came from Tokyo and moved here alone just to study so he's actually living in the school dorm. He had the highest marks of the whole institute, second and third years included, and he's been asked to be the Student Council President, but he turned the offer down to be able to prolong his part-time job shift here, obtained thanks to his scary brain." A little tic of the coloured lips and Akashi let out a little smile, guessing the first similarity his friend had found out, but the other kept on talking. "He's relatively popular in school, but it seems he prefers to keep a low profile and be on his own, to the point it can't be said he has any intimate friend. He has a reputation for his kindness, politeness and hard-work attitude but there have been even some cases in which some classmates tried to take advantage of him or attack him and ended up running away while he proved himself firm and authoritarian. It seemed that even some teachers have difficulties in imposing on him: he never disturbs and is always respectful, but this apathy of his, that nobody ever saw him breaking, intimidates some of the younger ones." A death glare Seijuro pretended he didn't notice and Reo, with a sigh, resumed, "Regarding his past, he attended Teiko Middle School."

Hearing that, Akashi widened his eyes.

"Teiko?" he asked, as for confirmation, but the other nodded.

"It seemed strange to me too," he admitted, "but it's true. Even here, he marched on scholarships for academic merits for all the three years, _obviously_ " Was it sarcasm what Seijuro heard?, "again the best of the whole school, for all the three years. The difference here is that he seemed to be interested even in common adolescents hobbies, he was part of the literature club and he'd been asked to play in some friendly match with the basketball club, _obviously_ " Sarcasm again. "proving himself an amazing player, even if with a, and I'm quoting his teammates, 'particular and almost evanescent, vaguely psychich' style of play, and I'm not sure I want to know what this means."

"Worthy son of Tetsuya." Akashi commented, not able to hold back a smile, but Reo turned serious instead and ignored his words.

"It's from here, the beginning of his first year second semester, that he began changing attitude toward others." he explained, "He began taking part to all the contest possible and imaginable as long as they had a money prize and he stopped signing for all the ones that didn't involve a profit. His reputation among the schoolmates suffered a bit, but he didn't really care so I got suspicious and checked some things."

Akashi frowned, confused by the sudden change in the story and in his friend's attitude.

"Suspects?" he asked, inquisitive.

Reo sustained his gaze with a serious one.

"They have financial issues, Sei-chan. Big ones." he admitted, "Kuroko-chan dropped school in the middle of his third year without graduating, probably right because of Seiji-chan's birth, and he's working, now as much as then, just as a butler…"

"…in a Butler Café." Seijuro remembered, dark, as his mind came back to the only meeting he had had with Tetsuya after breaking up with him.

If the story was true, back then the child was already born and suddenly Tetsuya's embarrass took a new light, as much as his continuous checking the phone, his nervousness and he way he had ran away after that strange calling.

Maybe Seiji was the ill one? Approximately counting, Seijuro realized the boy was barely three years old, so Kuroko surely had panicked knowing his son had a fever. And Shintarou had said, right in that occasion, that he wanted to become a paediatrician…

"Sei-chan, how…?"

"Reo," Akashi interrupted him, "did you find some relation with Midorima, Shuutoku old shooting guard?"

Mibuchi blinked, surprised, but then sighed.

"Can I go on in order?" he asked.

Seijuro made a face, but nodded and gestured him to go on.

"The information on his economical situation were private, so it took me a while to get them." Reo went on darkly, "Practically, the problems increased because Kuroko-chan developed some heart-related problems and he needs specific medicine and regular check-ups that cost a lot. He refused most of them, but risked a lot too: he had had two heart-attacks from his eighteenth to his twenty-first birthday, but then it seems that everything goes back to its place." Akashi widened his eyes, clearly shocked, but Reo interrupted him right before he could ask about Tetsuya. "Point is," he said, "I _think_ Seiji was trying to help his family, earning something with his means."

Seijuro kept silent for a moment, thinking. It took him a bit to metabolize the idea of Tetsuya suffering two heart-failings and that the both of them happened before he saw him at that dinner. Yes, that evening he looked strange and tired, but from there to guess he had a little son at home and was back from two heart-attacks… How many things had changed since when they broke up?

"Sei-chan, it doesn't end here."

Akashi lifted a fire gaze on his friend, even knowing it wasn't his fault.

"No?" he asked, vaguely threatening.

Reo, however, ignored the danger and shook his head.

"You asked me if Midorima-chan could be related with this story. Well, to me, yes." he revealed, stretching on the table to move the highest papers he just gave his boss and free in this way a particular document. He pointed the sign at the bottom of it, with a dark expression on his face, "This is Seiji-chan's birth certificate. The father is marked as 'unknown' and…"

"What are you saying, Reo?" Akashi interrupted, frowning while reading the document, "Right you told me Tetsuya is the father, even their last names match."

"Sei-chan." The other's voice was so dark that the red-head stopped reading to look at his face. There was seriousness, but even confusion, on that soft face. "I was wrong." Mibuchi murmured, but then he shook his head, "Or better saying, it is true that Seiji-chan is Kuroko-chan's son, but Kuroko-chan is not Seiji-chan's father."

"What the heck are you…?!"

"He's his _mother_ , Sei-chan." Reo interrupted, his voice a bit trembling, the hand on the desk too.

Silence. A long, endless silence in with both the men waited for the other to say something, no one daring to.

"Reo."

When Akashi finally talked, Mibuchi raised his eyes on him, surprised by the menacing tone his name was pronounced with.

"What?

"Do you realize Tetsuya is a male, don't you?" the red-head asked, furious in his calmness, laying the paper down on the desk far too slowly.

The other, however, didn't get scared and shrugged.

"This is what doctors say, Sei-chan, not me." he explained, straightening up, "Even if I'm like this, I can still discern on what a male body can or can't do." The blow hit its point and Akashi hesitated for a second at that bitter sentence, almost regretting attacking Reo in such a setting. He was maybe going to apologize, but the other stopped him shaking his hand as if to say it was nothing important. "However, I tried to get some information more in the hospital, but nobody wanted to answer me." The look he sent Seijuro was eloquent. "I guess you'd be interested in knowing it is the one where a certain Midorima Shintarou is acutally working at."

The red-head darkened immediately, a challenging aura around him.

"I'm really interested. " he commented, with a deadly voice promising disgraces for the green traitor.

Reo nodded but then moved all the papers, making a mess on the desk, to slip out the last one.

"Just one thing more: your friend's father signed an hospital admission for Kuroko-chan exactly fifteen years ago. Read the reason."

Seijuro frowned, but took the paper and examined it attentively. It was just a request of check-in for the patient Kuroko Tetsuya, eighteen years old, with the reason of…

Red eyes widened, shocked, and then ran to the green ones in front of them, but Reo simply nodded, darkly.

" _Cardiac_ _complications and a severe intern haemorrhage due to an emergency caesarean cut._ " he quoted by memory, then sighed, "From what I could grasp, the caesarean had already been executed because of some complications. Midorima-sensei cut Kuroko-chan open and pulled our little Sei-chan out; only _then_ they'd been brought to the hospital."

Seijuro hesitated.

"Then…it's true." he whispered, "Tetsuya is…the mother. _He_ carried him in his body."

"And it leaves another _unsolvable_ question open." Reo murmured, calling on himself Akashi's hallucinated eyes, "Who may ever be the father?"

Seijuro's world finally began spinning backward.

* * *

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 **Authoress' notes:**

Sorry _for any grammar mistake, I'm trying to erase them all but it's still a bit difficult ^^"_

 _I re-edited the previous chapters because htlm had deleted the spaces I used between the different paragraphs -.- I hope it is all easier now :)_


	5. Chapter IV

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

* * *

 _ **Chapter IV**_

* * *

" _Are you ready? Are you ready for this all, Sei-chan?"_

In Kyoto was difficult to discern day from night, especially in the center. The advertising neon, the big screens, the streetlamps and the river of persons invading the sidewalk created a chaos of lights and noises really not nightly. In the middle of those moving bodies and those alternate flashes, Akashi felt weird, and not just because of Reo's words bouncing all over within his brain.

The revelations of that night shocked him and, after an whole hour spent staring at Seiji's birth certificate, he had taken his jacket, exited the office and slipped in his car ignoring Mibuchi's running after him asking where he was going.

Honestly, he didn't know either. He was restless, nervous, and needed to _move_ so he had rimply let the green lights of the traffic lamps chose his path while his mind tried desperately to give sense to the disconnected thoughts inhabiting it.

He had a son.

The idea seemed so foolish, absurd, that Seijuro still hadn't managed to believe it wholly, despite having concrete proves of it. He had always thought he _couldn't_ have children, at least biologically, considering his sexual orientation and the fact that still, fifteen years after, he hadn't been able to forget Kuroko.

He turned right and, with the car, the same did his mind stream.

He wondered why Tetsuya hadn't told him. He would have never left him because of that, he would have stood there and even if the teal-head was pregnant, he would have stood beside him, during the pregnancy and the labor and…

 _Fifteen years…_ , Akashi's hands held the steering wheel so harshly that his knuckles completely paled.

He had lost fifteen years of his son's life, all the memories of his childhood and good part of his puberty. He missed his birth, didn't see him crying or saying his first word, he didn't accompany him at school on the first day and didn't help him studying for the most difficult tests, he didn't talk to his teachers, bring him somewhere, to the aquarium or in a trip, he didn't see him with his first love or complaining for this and that… He had _never_ seen him, to be precise, if not _only once_ and even by mistake, coincidentally.

A strange shiver ran down his spine, when he wondered, instinctively, what would have happened if Mayuzumi hadn't sent Seiji to bring him coffee. Would have he ever met him during that stage? Would have he ever noticed their similarity, ever asked for his name? Would have he ever found the truth? He knew his son just since twenty hours more or less, and yet he already felt as if losing him would mean his break, ripping out of him something absolutely vital that he had never known he had.

He was like an heart. Up until then, Seiji had breathed, existed, been the beats that allowed Seijuro to go on, without him even noticing; now that he had felt that low pulsing, hidden and unnoticed, Akashi knew it was a part of him he would have never been able to give up upon without losing everything completely.

A traffic-lamp before him turned suddenly yellow and then red and Seijuro didn't make it in time to move on another lane, to turn left, and so he was forced to stop in the end. The whole world seemed to be angry at him.

Sighed, feeling far too confused to keep on trying to answer his questions, so he chose to look around, orienteering himself and come back home. After a shower and a bit of sleep, he would have come back to the office and called Seiji with an excuse. He would have talked to him, because he needed to, but only about trivial and simple things; just to get to know _who_ was that son. Then he would have taken a decision and, in the end, in each case, he would have called Tetsuya. He deserved some explanations, at least them.

Due to that determination in his mind, his surprise was even bigger when he realized where he was.

Turning right, as the arrow on the lane's ground, he would have taken the path toward Rakuzan private school.

 _How ironic…_ , he thought, with half of bitter smile on his lips, but then the green flashed on and he turned toward the building all the same.

It was two o clock in the morning already and Seijuro suspected the curfew to be passed since a bit, but he parked all the same and got off the car to lay against the hood, staring at the dark imposing figure of the school he once attended too.

Bittersweet memories came back to his mind. Reo in his male body telling others to call him 'Onee-san', Nebuya eating like a pig and laughing so loud that all the walls seemed to tremble, Hayama being more annoying than Kise and looking like a wild animals with his sharp teeths, Mayuzumi acting all superior and irritating and then in the shadows protecting his kohai like a mother-hen, but even Tetsuya passing by to greet him and the long escapes from the other members of the basketball club who were trying to pull out of the teal-head his secret to keep at lash the scary Akashi Seijuro… So many moments that vanished in a second when conceited voices and the sudden turning on of a lot of lights in the building reached his mind, breaking his personal bubble.

He frowned, surprised, but then dethatched from the car to get near, just in time to see the entrance door opening and someone running out of it, chased after by angry and indignant shouts. From the height and build, he surely wasn't a teacher. Probably a student, but the darkness of the alleyway as the fugitive ran on it made it difficult to guess his looks.

Seijuro got near the iron gate enclosing the school but his eyes didn't lie for more than a second over the three man after the boy.

Red hair, subtle face, average height, a faded pajama on. When one of the three teacher grabbed him by his arm, he turned and began wriggling to shake him off and the locks on his face rose, revealing two different-colored eyes, one definitely pale and the other…

The other was red. Akashi knew even without seeing it.

"Seiji!" he instinctively called when even a second teacher grabbed the boy, but his voice sounded threatening and had the most effect over the adults than the guy.

These ones, in fact, raised their eyes on him, as the young Kuroko kept on wriggling to get free of their grip, absolutely uncaring of that new comer.

"Akashi-san?" noticed the third man, approaching the gate and allowing Seijuro to recognize him in his numerous years, the white hair and the roundish glasses on the wrinkled face.

"Principal Hashimoto." he answered coldly, without a real greeting, before moving his gaze again on the fight still obstinately kept on by his son, despite his being outnumbered situation, "What's happening?"

The man sighed, turning like him toward the men who seemed to have finally been able to immobilize the red-head by forcing his arms behind his back.

"One of our student's father, sadly enough, had been urgently hospitalized just some minutes ago." he explained, "The guy lost his temper when we told him and tried to run to him."

Akashi's heart lost a beat. Seiji's father meaning…Tetsuya?!, Tetsuya had been hospitalized?! What fo-…?! He didn't even finish wondering. Somehow, he already knew.

Seiji struggled trying to bite one of the teachers, who consequently yelled at him angrily and Seijuro took his decision almost without noticing.

"Let him go." he ordered the man with a threatening gaze, then turned toward he principal, "I'll take full responsibility for accompanying Kuroko-kun at the hospital."

One of the teachers widened his eyes.

"But the man's in Tokyo!" he tried to say, uncertain, but a sharp gesture from Hashimoto turned him silent.

"Akashi-san, I can't allow it." he said, serious, "The boy is underage and over the school's responsibility and…"

"Tomorrow morning, when he'll be allowed to get out because the curfew won't be valid anymore, he'll take the first train to Tokyo and you know it." Akashi answered back as coldly, "Would you rather him to disappear from school for days and for the scandal of the prestigious Rakuzan School losing a student or him to come with me, under my responsibility so that the school has nothing to worry about?"

It was not a true question and both the men knew it. Even Seiji, hearing those words, stopped fighting to turn toward the other red-head outside the gate and to stare at him with eyes wide open. Well, at least the visible one, given that the other – the baby blue one? – was again covered by his fringe.

Akashi held the principal's gaze with calmness and authority, hiding masterfully the turmoil in his head made of images of Kuroko in a hospital and in pain, alone. In the end, Hashimoto closed his eyes and sighed.

"I want your sign on the visits register." he declared, "You'll put it black on white that the boy will be under your care until the very second he'll be again with his parent or at school."

Seijuro didn't hesitate in drawing the elegant kanji for his name on the paper a teacher handed him some time after, then, finally, the gate opened a bit.

Seiji slipped out quickly, almost scared of being locked in again, and almost as quickly he followed Akashi to the car, but at the very moment of getting in, he stopped.

The man looked at him with surprise.

"I can take a train." the boy murmured after a second, vaguely defensive, and Seijuro understood.

Seiji was not a fool and he certainly knew he was born from Kuroko; he must have made the same considerations and reached the same conclusion, impossible to ignore, that even he had been forced to face all night long.

For a moment, the two of them stared at each other, saying nothing, from above the car. There were still so many uncertain things, among them the reason for Kuroko to try to keep them apart, but there was even that very same Tetsuya in a hospital bed that kept them inexorably united, and so, in the end, Akashi blinked once.

"My car is faster."

Seiji valued silently that sentence, then, without any reply, he opened the door and sat on the passenger seat.

In the very second he sat at the driver seat, Akashi felt instead the anxiety rising. There was something like a shiver under his skin that was trembling and not managing to slip away was lying there, vibrant, making him feel restless and nervous. Already when he was maneuvering the car he realized that, for as much as he would have pushed it, it wouldn't have seemed fast enough.

In that moment, he wished he could use the private helicopter of his society, but he knew the hospital wouldn't have let him land on their roof.

"Midorima Hospital?" he asked in a low voice, exiting the park, even if he already knew the answer.

Seiji stared at him emotionlessly, but in truth he was surprised that _that man_ knew in which hospital his father was.

 _Thinking about it…_

"Why were you outside my school?"

Seijuro didn't blink at the clear suspect in the boy's voice.

"Where are good manners?" he asked instead, trying to change the topic. He was absolute and as an absolute he knew that answering with a 'I was taking a ride trying to accept the fact that you're my son' wouldn't have helped the situation.

The sentence must hit the boy because he slightly blushed and Akashi thought that the polite attitude of Tetsuya must have left its print on him.

"You're not my boss, now." Seiji muttered all the same, trying to get the last word all the same, "And however I'm with you only because of my father."

Mentioning Kuroko brought both the minds to that frail phantom they loved so desperately and that was just fighting with his heart to stay alive.

Akashi took the highway to Tokyo and pressed the accelerator.

* * *

It took almost five and half hours by car to reach Tokyo from Kyoto, but after three with a good speed, Akashi found himself stuck in the traffic because of an accident that only gods knew how and most al all _why_ had happened, there and in that moment.

He held the steering wheel as if he wanted to crush it, but he still hadn't dared to say a word. The reason, a simple as childish but natural need to hold back and give Seiji a good exemple.

With the corner of his eye, he spied on him.

Despite being five in the morning, the boy hadn't surrendered to sleep, but he sat straight and composed on the seat, with hands elegantly folded on his lap and his eyes fixed on the street. He hadn't move a muscle nor said a word since when their departure and his expression was even more unreadable than Tetsuya: with Kuroko, Akashi had experience, learned the tricks to unmask him; about this boy, he didn't know anything.

"Why do you cover your left eye?" he asked, coming back with his ones to the queue proceeding slowly of a meter, "It is different from the right one, isn't it? They're beautiful."

Seiji did the same of him a few before, he spied a bit and then turned to look again at the street, but stood completely apathetic.

"It is the same shade of my father's." he explained, "To me, it is something really precious, the only physical trait I earned from him. I like the idea of being the only one to chose who can and who can't see it."

Akashi nodded, silently accepting that explanation but at the same time reading in it more than what Seiji wanted to say.

The boy had grown up with Tetsuya and Tetsuya alone, and yet that eye was the only thing they clearly have in common, exception made for some minor similarities that could however pass unnoticed. To him it must have been weird to resemble someone he had never seen, that he didn't know how and why left his life before they could met, and probably his only parent had taken care of him with so much love that that particularity turned out as important as the real air for him. To Seiji protecting that iris was probably like protecting Kuroko himself from all the bad the world and his own heart did to him.

 _He's a determined boy with a big heart._ , Seijuro thought, imagining his teal-haired phantom in front of him, _Just like you, Tetsuya._

"Kuroko has always had eyes of a wonderful color, the shade of a clear sky." he commented, daring a sad smile, "You're right in treasuring it."

Seiji seemed confused by that conversation, despite being difficult to say with that mask on, but Seijuro was starting to notice the cracks making it far more imprecise than Tetsuya's and strived to open it by force. He _had_ to understand that guy.

They moved a couple of meters onward before the queue stopped again and, this time, while curbing the car, Akashi sighed.

"We should have moved in together right after graduation, your father and I. In the States." Seiji turned suddenly at that low but determined murmuring, filled with an authoritarian calmness and yes, somehow, melancholic, but Seijuro kept his eyes on the street and didn't meet his gaze, lost in thoughts, "We would have attended the same college, had an house together, begun a new life. We even talked about getting married, one day, since it is legal there and we were in a relationship since five years, even if with our bad and good times." He giggled a bit to that idea the looked just like a childish foolishness after so many years, but that back then was so close to get real, "It should have been ' _just the beginning_ '," the smile, already little, vanished from Akashi's lips, "but at the last second, Tetsuya told me his mother was ill and he should have stood in Japan a bit more. I offered to postpone the departure and stay back to help him, but he refused saying it didn't make sense and so I left, sure that he would have reached me as soon as possible."

Seiji stared at the older one, but without hostility. The man was trying to made contact with him, it was clear, and he was trying to reach him gently, offering him a path that walked on the road his father was building before his conception; and, to be honest, what was wrong in that? Akashi probably just wanted to break the silence to let him know that he was there and that they shared something – Tetsuya but even half of their genetic code –. It was simple request, kind and not pressing at all; a low and gentle ' _Please?_ '.

"But he didn't do it." he murmured on his own, guessing the end of that story that seemed sadly too happy for being Kuroko's.

Akashi closed his eyes for a moment, as if fallen under some kind of pain, but he shook his head.

"He grew colder, more distant. In the end, I was the only one calling and he didn't even always pick up." His eyelids lifted again and scarlet irises stared at the horizon before them without really seeing it. "One night, he called me and told me he had fallen in love with a girl while assisting his mother. He said he didn't love me anymore and that he wanted to break up. I was in America, I tried to ask for an explanation but he didn't let me. When, a month after, I tried to call him once again, he had already changed his number." He shook his head, as if with himself. "I came back to Japan almost three years later and I made up an excuse to see him again, in a reunion of ex-classmates from middle school." He spied on Seiji with an accomplice attitude, "Midorima was there too, that night."

They boy guessed the implicit question.

"Even Kise Ryuota?" he dared back, as if to show that he wasn't unprepared on the topic, "Aomine Daiki? Murasakibara Atsushi?"

Akashi blinked a couple of times, surprised.

 _Add Kise, Aomine and Murasakibara to the traitors-to-exterminate list._ , he promised himself, then nodded.

"Yes, them too. We all attended the same middle school, we were…"

"…in the same basketball team." Seiji finished, brushing his hands together a bit, "Uncle Daiki told me that much, even if he never mentioned you."

 _Aomine with atrocious tortures._

Seijuro nodded, despite his irritation for having been brutally deleted from that stories, like an unwanted image cut away with photo-shop from an otherwise perfect picture.

"That night, he told me that, after being with a woman, the mere idea how having dated a man made him feel sick and that just looking at me disgusted him."

Seiji jerked, unable to hold back. _Mom told him this?!_ He couldn't believe it, it was impossible! His mother was not that kind of person! Akashi, on the other hand, had referred that conversation as if it was nothing, with his usual calmness, but the boy was sure that at least back then those words must have hurt him a lot. If he were the once receiving them, he would have suffered hell for them.

Akashi seemed completely unfazed by that memory and he kept on talking, always slowly, as if waiting for being interrupted. Surprisingly, he smiled a bit.

"I think you had a fever that night." he reminisced, "Your father did nothing but checking his phone every and each two seconds." Another sigh and the smile vanished again, "A little after, I moved to London and lived there for six years. When I came back here, I promised myself not to look for him, since Tetsuya had clarified that he didn't want to see me again, and I stood in Kyoto. I think I never actually put foot on Tokyo since then, to be honest."

Seiji stood silent, only the low breath of the car motor could be heard, and both the men closed up in their own thoughts.

The queue kept on slowly, straining like reviving those moments trying to fill the gaps left byt the – missing – version of Kuroko himself and at the same time trying not to thing too much about him.

Akashi let that night and the way the teal-head had ran away dangling before his eyes for a moment more. Then he didn't manage to hold back.

"I kept on telling myself you had to be the son of him and the girl he left me for," he admitted, "but, in the very second I saw you for the first time, I thought ' _This is how a son of me and Tetsuya would look like…_ '. Then I called myself an idiot: how could it even be possible? Both Tetsuya and I are males; we can't have children together. Surely, I was just deceiving myself."

Seiji masterfully hid the pain for that blow.

"I understand." he murmured, moving his gaze outside the window to hide his expression. Then, Akashi _didn't know_ of his father's ability; to him, their similarity was just a weird and disturbing coincidence and he was probably helping him just because of it and because of the love he once felt for his father. Probably, he was auto-convincing himself that what his eyes were showing him was just an illusion.

The boy's hands instinctively strengthened their grip one over the other and Akashi noticed it, but didn't mention.

Instead, he said: "I kept on thinking it since when I read on your birth certificate that Tetsuya is your mother."

Seiji suddenly turned toward him; his visible eye widened and his mouth opened, his splendid mask completely crushed.

"How did you…?!" he gasped, unable to end his question.

Akashi pushed the car forward of a meter.

"Money can't bring your boyfriend back to you, but it can easily allow you to investigate his son's past." Seijuro peacefully answered, his eyes always on the road but with a victorious smile on his lips.

"You had no rights to do something like that!"

"And did Tetsuya had the right to keep _my son_ hidden from me?!"

Seijuro's poisonous reply fell in the most absolute silence, making them both jerking.

It was the first time for that truth to be said out loud, the first time Akashi showed he recognized Seiji as his son, and for the both of them it was a strange feeling that needed some seconds to be accepted.

At the end, the adult sighed, closing his eyes.

"Seiji, I don't want to intrude and ruin your lives, okay? I'm not _that_ horrible of a person." He declared his voice firm, but with a tone strangely…defeated?, "I just want to… _know_." Seijuro's grip on the steering wheel tightened and Seiji lowered the face toward his hands, staring at them confusedly. "I want to know the reason for him to leave me that way, what made him think I wasn't suited to be a good father and…why he had never even _thought_ about telling him, in all this time."

"Would you have accepted it?" Akashi turned, surprised, but his son sustained his gaze with his red eye as cold as his voice, "Would you have taken responsibility for what had happened?"

A car honked, but everybody ignored it.

"I can't really tell you, now, how I would have reacted back then. The idea of being a father is so…strange." Seijuro admitted, determined in being honest, then he turned again forward, "But I know that I loved your father too much to leave him, no matter the reason."

For a second, Seiji stood still watching his father's profile, so similar to his, but then he turned to the window, almost running from that sight because unable to sustain it.

Akashi understood and accepted his need of time, so he kept silent too and concentrated only on driving.

* * *

Forty-five minutes completely in silence passed – they still stuck in that damn queue that was making Akashi always more nervous and his grip always tighter – before Seiji spoke.

"Dad's an hermaphrodite." he was whispering in such a low voice that Seijuro had difficulties in hearing him and he kept his eyes on the window, never looking for his father's ones. He seemed…ashamed of something. "He has both the male and female reproductive organs, but it is usually almost impossible for the likes of him to have children, they're mostly sterile." he shrugged, with an indifference that didn't suit his voice, "But destiny must have chosen to play a prank on him and he found himself pregnant during his last year of high school." Seiji closed his eyes; in his mind all the fragments of stories he had put together trough the years, stealing a detail to an uncle and another to another, always pretending that he hadn't realized how heavy his birth had been on Kuroko's shoulders. "He dropped school to take care of the pregnancy, he had no other choice, and he never graduated." It was a sad, almost cruel, smile's turn to paint the guy's lips, "When the birth day came I guess nature tried to make amend to his mistake, but he was simply too stubborn to let me die and practically made himself being opened in our living room to make me come out." He shook his head, shocked as usual by his father's foolishness. "He paid with his health tough: his heart has never been able to sustain him anymore; it turned too weak after the labor and now he'd need a transplant, but dad didn't want to take it because of the cost." _He prefers sending to school the monster that ruined his life._ "Grandma always says we've been very lucky and that for dad my birth was a miracle." His voice lowered, turning almost inaudible, "I'm not sure she's right…"

"You try talking about yourself in these terms again and you'll have to face me, did I make myself clear?" Akashi had no idea of _how_ such a sentence exited his lips, so out of character. A bit because of the darkness in Seiji's speech, a bit because of the clear guiltiness the boy felt for his father's hard life and a bit because of a need to enlighten the atmosphere a bit, but the red-head felt all the same that he truly believed the meaning of those words.

Seiji made an indignant face.

"I'm not a child!" he protested, then he lifted his chin proudly, challenging the other, "And even if I were, dad would kill you if you ever dared laying a finger on me."

 _I have no doubts._ Kuroko had always been very protective of children.

"Instead, I'm almost sure he would agree with me." Akashi replied, but then he turned serious, "You're far more than a destiny's prank, Seiji," Red eyes met. "and you should have already learnt it from everything Tetsuya had done for you. If you were anything even minimally less than the best thing in his whole life, he wouldn't have gone to these extents for you."

Seiji lowered his gaze, embarrassed, but he didn't look convinced.

"You can't tell…" he whispered in fact.

Seijuro built up his best fake smirk.

"You're right," he said, "but he broke up with _me_ for you."

For a second, Seiji raised his eyes and stood motionless staring at his father. Seijuro was going to ask him if he was okay when, suddenly, the boy brought a hand to his own mouth and started laughing.

Akashi had never seen a more beautiful sight. Seiji had a genuine free expression and little wrinkles were creating beside his eyes; his fringe fell backward freeing even the teal eye, even if closed, and the sound of his laughter was pure an crystalline.

"Dad didn't tell me my father had such a big ego!" he commented between laughter.

"And what did he tell you about him?"

Seiji slowly stopped laughing, keeping just a little smile on his lips, but he didn't seem troubled by the sudden question and instead he answered calmly.

"He doesn't really talk much about him." he admitted, faking indifference and like Akashi talking as if of a third person, "I remember asking, once when I was little, but dad turned immediately so sad that I swore to myself I'd have never asked anything. Sometimes it happened that he asked me if I wanted to know anything, but I've always pretended that I didn't care 'cause I knew he was still feeling bad about it, whatever 'it' was." Quick, he stole a glance to Seijuro's face, "But he had never, _never_ , talked bad about him, even in the most difficult moments."

Akashi kept his eyes on the road, but gulped. In the end, Tetsuya had kept on defending him even during the years they had spent separated.

"Thank you." he murmured and Seiji nodded, but then giggled a bit.

"Sure thing," he commented with face seriousness, "I wished he warned me from his huge ego, his bossy attitude, his irritating smirk, his addiction to always be right and…"

"Did anybody tell you you're almost as irritating and straight as your father?"

"Uncle Taiga usually does it once per day."

"Figures."

* * *

An hour later, with that few of amusement vanished and nervousness again there, they had drived the same length of half an hour without traffic. Akashi slammed his hand on the steering wheel.

"That's enough!" he growled, bringing his hands to the radio and working on it.

"What…?" Seiji tried to ask, but the car connected to the man's mobile and a moment after the phone rings were audible in the whole car.

A few seconds and a known voice was heard.

" _Akashi, right now I can't…_ "

"I'm counting to ten, Shintarou." Seijuro hissed, not giving the green head time to finish his sentence, "If by then you'd been able to give me a full report on Tetsuya's conditions, I'll may consider sparing your life despite you being one of those low beings that had kept _my_ son's existence from me. And don't even think about lying to me. I know everything already."

"… _What everything, nanodayo?_ "

" _Everything_ , Shintarou. In particular, Tetsuya being an hermaphrodite, carrying and raising my child, having heart problems and you and those other betrayers from Generation of Miracles being part of this all and not. Telling. Me. Now, _speak._ "

For a second Seiji believed, scared, that his uncle was foolish enough to refuse Akashi's order, but then Midorima's voice came, clear.

" _He had had another heart attack, the third already, and this time we had to reanimate him with the defibrillator. He's sleeping now and is sedated, but his condition is stable. He absolutely needs a transplant, the sooner possible, but as long as we can't find a suitable donor and he doesn't sign the authorization for the surgery, we can only wait…_ "

With those words, Seiji couldn't hold back anymore.

"But he's okay now, isn't him?!" he asked, anxious.

" _SEIJI?! What are you doing with Akashi, nanodayo?!_ "

"A family reunion." was the boy's sarcastic reply, but Seijuro, finally spotting an exit from the highway, preceded him before he could continue.

"We're coming to Tokyo, we should be there in a few hours." he declared.

" _I don't know if there is someone who can stay home with Seiji…_ "

"I'm staying with dad!"

"I'm staying with him."

Seijuro and Seiji stared at each other for a second, surprised for talking at the same time, and a heavy sigh came clearly from the loudspeaker.

" _We'll choose once you're here._ " Midorima's surrendering was complete.

* * *

The hospitals were almost all the same, white, sterilized and smelly of medicines and death.

Seiji left behind everybody, father and uncle, with no second thoughts just to run to the white door of his dad's room, in the cardiology department, to open it and almost jump in; Seijuro, on the other hand, stopped right out of it and turned to face Shintarou with a dark expression.

"How's him?"

"Bad." Midorima adjusted the glasses on his nose with his left bendaged hand, refusing to golden his pill. "He won't last long without the transplant, but there's still no donor compatible, even giving for sure the fact that he'll accept to take the surgery."

"Does this mean the only thing we should do is sitting here and wait?" Seijuro growled menacingly, but Shintarou looked at him coldly, not letting himself being intimidated.

"If you think I'm doing less than my best, you're dead wrong, nanodayo." he declared.

Akashi sighed, furious, but he knew that taking it out on Midorima wouldn't have solved anything so he shook his head.

"You should have told me." he hissed all the same, but tiredly, as if he had not a single ounce of strength left in his body.

"I know, nanodayo."

"But you didn't do it."

"Kuroko asked me not to."

Akashi's eyes looked weakly for his.

"Why?"

"You should ask him."

Seijuro sighed, even more exhausted, and for a moment he stared at the clear blue sky out of the window in front of Tetsuya's door. That so familiar color seemed to mock him and in the end he turned his back on it to chase after an identical but for him far more important azure.

"You still should have told me." he whispered one last time before entering the room.

Midorima observed him.

"I know." he repeated, when he couldn't be heard anymore.

* * *

Red absurdly ruffled hair made Seijuro smiled when he opened his eyes after a an-hour-lond second to rest on a char at the right of an anonymous hospital bed.

Slowly, in silence, the man got up and put off his elegant suit jacket to lay it carefully on the shoulders of one Seiji who had fallen asleep on his own crossed arms, laid on the mattress near Tetsuya's knees.

That same Tetsuya on who Seijuro's eyes slipped slowly over. Tetsuya who was pale and motionless, like the IV in his veins and his skinny arms; Tetsuya who had grown up, a man with fine yet masculine traits, and yet seemed still so little and frail in the hospital patients gown. Tetsuya who, still, gave no sign of waking up.

Meek, Akashi returned to his seat, but he pointed the elbows on his own knees and laid his face on his folded hands.

He observed Tetsuya's face under the oxygen mask Midorime had wanted to limit the risks of another collapse, surely deadly this time.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he sighed, even knowing that he couldn't be heard, "I would have thrown everything away just to stay with you two."

And, he realized while stretching a hand to caress Kuroko's lifeless one, with no regrets.

* * *

Kuroko didn't remember waking up, neither going to sleep to be honest. He didn't remember anything for sure, but all of a sudden he found Seijuro's eyes before him and he didn't understand anything anymore. He was in a bed, had tubes in his arms, there was a lot – _a lot_ – of confusion in his head and the world seemed a bottle-bottom distant. Each single thing was distorted, confused, and the ones that weren't looked almost unreal.

He hid his confusion behind his mask and Seijuro didn't seem to notice.

They talked, Tetsuya didn't even realized about what, but he limited himself to answer just the question he could understand and that still seemed to vanish from his memory like sand in a clepsydra. Only a few sentences remained in his mind, crowding it with chaotic images of horrible scenarios in which Akashi Seito took revenge on Seijuro, on him, on _Seiji._

Seijuro had met Seiji?! He had seen him and realized! He couldn't allow it because Seiji had to be protected!

"I'm not asking you to make me part of your life again, if you don't want, Kutoko." Seijuro whispered suddenly, holding Tetsuya's hand and finally managing to bring his confused and foggy for the sedatives mind back to the present at least for a second, "But I beg of you, please, to allow me to stay in Seiji's one. He's my son too, after all."

"No."

Kuroko didn't even realized he had talked, the thoughts in his mind were confused and too rapid, running, incomprehensible, but in his chest he felt some feelings stirring and he chose to follow them in the contorted chaos surrounding everything.

"…Kuroko?"

"I don't want you to get near him!" he exclaimed. His breathe labored, shocked, he gulped. "Akashi-kun, I…I know _he_ won't come back" and Kuroko wasn't able to specify who 'he' was, but was sure Seijuro would have understood all the same, "I know, but… I can't, Akashi-kun, I can't! If I only try to _imagine_ you near Seiji, I'm scared the boy would say something that could make you angry – and he'll do it, I know because that's how it is – and you'll let him dominate you again and…" He began shaking his head with force and the whole world started spinning around him. He grabbed his own skull with the hands, desperate in his attempt to stop the spinning. "I can't let anybody hurt Seiji. I love him too much to put him in danger." Akashi widened his eyes, Kuroko saw them growing bigger and bigger, so huge they looked as if they'd have eaten his face, but he didn't bend. "I'm sorry, Akashi-kun, I'm sorry. I wish it was different, I wish I was different, but… I'm sorry."

Kuroko couldn't understand what happened after, because a nurse approached him running and then everything turned blurred and then black.

The last thing he got, was Akashi's voice: "Don't apologize. _I understand._ "

* * *

Seiji was walking slowly, careful not to spill anything of the amazing breakfast he was bringing on his dad's tray, and when he finally entered the room he smiled victoriously.

Tetsuya was still asleep and Midorima was checking his monitors, so Seiji put the food on the bedside table and looked around.

He frowned.

"Where's…Akashi-san?" he finally asked, faking indifference and correcting himself before calling the man with some epithet like 'father'.

Midorima stiffened a bit, but chose not to lie.

"Your father he woke up earlier, but was probably raving because of the anesthesia." He took a deep breath. "Akashi left for Kyoto a few later."

Silence.

"I understand." was Seiji's only answer before sitting again beside his father.

Midorima patted his shoulder before leaving.

* * *

The traffic sign above his head said "Welcome to Kyoto" and Akashi felt the childish need to spit at it, but held back.

While slowly driving to his office, he felt a bitter taste at the back of his throat and a painful grip in his chest and, thanks to Tetsuya in his high school years, he knew that was how defeat tasted like.

* * *

An hour and after later, Kuroko woke up again. After a week he was allowed to come back home, while waiting for a donor. Seiji stood with him three days more, before leaving for Kyoto, to clean some things at school.

Instead at Rakuzan's stop, however, he got off at the nearest one to the Akashi Group Building.

* * *

When his office door opened, Akashi was ready for everything – a Reo coming to make another scene about his choice stupidity, a Mayuzumi fixed on remembering him how idiotic he was, something like that – but not a furious Kuroko Seiji walking toward him marching and with his fringe carefully put behind his ear, so that the baby blue iris was clearly visible in its shining rage.

Clearly, the adult thought, Reo and Mayuzumi had decided that letting the boy in was the best punishment to give him.

Seiji slammed his open hands on the desk, uncaring of the papers that fell from it.

"Why did you leave like that?!" he exclaimed, but Akashi kept calm and cold, laying against the chair back.

"Businesses needed my presence." he simply answered.

"Don't you try feeding me this crap, don't you dare!" Seiji growled, letting the whole influence Aomine and Kagami had had on him to take over, "You said you wanted to talk to _my mother_ and instead you just left?! Who the fuck do you think you are?!"

"Definitely someone with a politer tongue than you." Seijuro retorted making a face over such a foul language, "Does your mother know you're using these words?"

"Quit trying to change the topic!" Seiji yelled. His loud and almost hysterical voice made both Reo and Chihiro show on the door, but neither of them dared to intervene. "I trusted the fact that you would have _at least_ man up enough to _talk_ with him and instead you just ran away!"

"I _did_ talk to your mother and _then_ I left." Seijuro corrected, impassive, "And you shouldn't talk about things you know nothing about."

Seiji widened his eyes, shocked.

"What…" he hesitated, confused. He didn't understand! "And what did you talk about?"

"Things." Seijuro answered lowering his eyes on the papers he was reading just before being interrupted, "I apologized for intruding in your life and we agreed that it won't happen again. Simple as it is."

"… Simple."

"Indeed." Akashi assented, always not raising his eyes from his documents.

For long moments there was silence, with Seijuro not daring to look at his son, but in the end Seiji snapped.

"If you knew since the very beginning that you'd leave again, you shouldn't have come back in at all!" he screamed, with all his lungs and his fists clenched to the point that his arms were trembling.

Akashi lifted his head suddenly hearing a crack in his son's scream, but he barely managed to catch a glimpse of the tears on his face before the boy ran out of the office.

"Seiji-chan! Wait!" Reo tried to stop him, but the guy was faster, escaped Mayuzumi and slipped in the elevator. The black-head stared at the whole situation while paralyzed on the door, unable to move for long moments, and when he finally managed to turn back to Akashi, he was still staring at the papers in his hands, but those were trembling and his eyes unfocused. "Sei-cha…" he murmured approaching him.

"Tetsuya is scared of the Emperor." Seijuro dryly stopped him, but something in his voice let the other think he was talking more to himself. "He didn't want me to get near Seiji because he's scared I'll hurt him."

Reo lowered his gaze a bit, hesitant, but stopped in front of the desk.

"You sure he thinks that for real?" he slowly murmured, "He was just out of anesthesia and raving, you told me, so maybe he didn't mean…"

"Reo." Akashi laid slowly the documents on his desk then, with the same pace, he lifted his eyes on his coworker and Reo found himself lost in a land of charcoals, red of heat, but lacking of any flame and doomed to die. "If you had seen his eyes, you wouldn't be asking me." that expression, that gaze of pure terror in the teal-head's gaze, Akashi would have never forgotten; it was tormenting him, ceaselessly, since when he had left Tokyo. "He was scared of me."

Mibuchi hesitated, lowering his gaze on his shoes. For women.

He felt the wish to tear them apart, but he held himself back. In his life, he had made a lot of foolish choices for the person he loved, and he thought he was loving back from; after breaking up with Yoichi, he had regretted a lot of them, he had called himself an idiot and screamed with his face buried in his pillow for hours, crying so much it hurt. Every time he showered, he felt the need to sink the nails in his own remodeled flesh and open long bleeding cuts in it to cover those new curves, that different belly, everything; while getting dressed in the morning, he made himself the most beautiful woman in the world and then threw cosmetics at the mirror. He got to work and put on the best smile he could fake, act foolish with men that didn't know the truth and reassured calmly the ones who instead, like Mayuzumi, knew the whole story and he was the perfect liar. He had even tricked the psychologist of the hospital, before the surgery, convincing him that he was the one who wanted that change, that he was absolutely sure of it, that he felt the need of it, when in truth the only thing he needed was someone to tell him 'I love you' with no _but_ s right after.

Among all, only Akashi kept on not believing his lies. Reo knew it, he could read it on his eyes every morning when they met in front of the office and the red-head analyzed him always for a moment too much, as if waiting to see him crumbling down in pieces or coming back to how he used to be all of a sudden. Seijuro was the one who pitied him the most, but without showing it; while everybody was trying confusedly to comfort him, the other had given him the tools to do it on his own, a job he was good at and the secret on his body and Mayuzumi almost as a bodyguard.

He knew he had still to accept what had happened and his new self, but he recognized to Seijuro all the help he had given him. Then why, among all the persons in the world, he had to endure that pain?

"Sei-chan…"

"I have work to do for tomorrow's meeting." Akashi interrupted him, again coldly, handing him some papers, "I need photocopies of these."

Reo stood motionless, shocked, but Seijuro kept on writing on other documents and didn't look at him. In the end, he took the papers and exited the office silently.

* * *

Seiji ran. He ran until when he was breathless, when he felt so back he thought he would have thrown up there on the sidewalk, when he didn't even know how much he had ran anymore. He pushed passersby, ignored the complains at his back and went on until when, suddenly, he stopped.

He was in the middle of a park, he wouldn't have been even able to say which, and there was absolutely nobody, but he didn't care.

Without thinking, he pulled out his mobile from his pocket. He dialed the number by memory and brought the phone to his ear while with the other hand he grinded his fringe before his left eye.

His sobs, unstoppable, were so loud that they covered the sound of the other person answering.

" _SEIJI?!_ " Tetsuya exclaimed, hearing his son's crying at the other end, " _What happened?!_ "

"Mom…!" the boy whined, unable to understand what he himself wanted to say, "I…I'm sorry, I…! I can't, I can't… Mom, he's a bastard! I was far better without him, why did I have to meet him?!" His voice didn't raise, it stood desperate, sharp and cracked in sobs, "Why?! He's just a stupid selfish bastard!... Mom…!"

" _Seiji! Seiji, listen to me, okay? Listen to d-mom, okay?_ "

Seiji let out a little giggle, for merely a second, while hearing Tetsuya accepting his nickname and then forced himself to run the free hand on his eyes, drying them by force, as he could. With a groan, he assented.

" _Seiji, where are you, now?_ "

"…O-Outside." he gulped, passing his hand back even on his cheeks and sniffing, "I don't want to come back to the office, but not at school either, and…"

" _Then come back home._ "

Seiji widened his eyes, but not a negation came from the mobile at his ear.

"But…!" he tried to say, but Kuroko stopped him.

" _Seiji._ " He called him with a firm voice, serious, but right for that reassuring and Seiji laid on it accepting its meaning slowly, letting himself being lulled by its calmness and warmth, " _Sometimes we need to close up to everything and take a moment to clear things with ourselves, before doing it with others. Nobody is perfect, Seiji. You can act selfishly and childishly, once in a while._ "

Seiji gulped. He passed again a sleeve on his face, because he had cried again, and then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, a bit trembling, trying to calm down.

"Can we watch basket in TV tonight?"

A low but clearly relieved giggling reached his ears and made him smile too.

" _How does 'chocolate and vanilla ice-cream on the couch' sound to you?_ "

He could always count on his mother, at least.

"But can you eat it?"

" _I'm not inviting Midorima-kun._ "

"I guess this is a solution…" Seiji commented slowly, laughing a bit.

" _It is. Seiji?_ "

"Yes?"

" _I'm waiting for you._ "

* * *

Reo exited the elevator holding both the sides of his coat above his chest, but kept on looking down even when he approached Mayuzumi.

"How's him?" the grey-head asked, despite already knowing the answer.

"He says he has still work to finish." Mibushi answered sadly.

"Obviously."

The dark haired man stood silent and let the other walk first to the exit, following him meekly just a step behind. Chihiro's shoulders in front of him looked like an insurmountable mountain even if in truth, since he was wearing ballerina shoes, they were the same height. He sighed, knowing it was not a matter of muscles, but of essence.

Mayuzumi was a _man_ , a strong and very perfect man, while he was something undefined and at half, a anthropic toy for both the science and his own imbecility.

The albino approached the sidewalk and opened the door of the car he just went to take while Mibuchi was trying to detach Akashi from his chair. For as much as he knew Chihiro was just trying to be kind, the black-head felt hurt by that gesture. And that night, really, he couldn't pretend to endure.

"Don't do it." he ordered lowly, but sitting. Chihiro showed him an arched brow, but then closed the door and reached for the other side of the car, forcing the other to wait before being able to conclude that sentence he had kept bottled up with not strength to say it out loud up until then: "I'm not a woman."

"Really?" Mayuzumi asked, sitting but without turning the car on, "I thought it was what you wanted to become."

"Quit it." Reo clenched his teeth and his hands grip on his skirt, but that was not sufficient to blow down the tension enough for it not to mirror in his voice.

"No, you are the one who should quit it, now." Mibuchi turned to the albino at those harsh and cold words, just to see the other slamming his hand on the steering wheel. The green-eyed man jerked, but Chihiro turned with the whole trunk toward him and prevented him from speaking. "You have to quit pretending you're okay with this whole mess." He hissed, angrily, finding himself pressed with his back against the door, his eyes widened and his mouth opened, unable to stop the other's monologue. "You have to get angry and scream and break everything and tell us how much it hurts to be like this and how much you want to come back to how you used to be. You have to tell us you want a pay rise to take the surgery again or that you want Akashi to find that son of a bitch and have him killed by some professional killer or that you want him to do it in person, and you know he's dying to do it. Do what the fuck you want, I don't give a shit, but _quit_ pretending everything's fine! Otherwise, I swear to God, I will pretend you're a real chick 'til when you'll tell me to fuck myself with that gay voice of yours."

He was trembling, Mibuchi felt he had no more the control over his own body. He was scared, but not of Chihiro despite his unexpected outburst. He was scared and stop.

"Quit it…" he whispered, feeling betraying tears reaching his eyes, but Mayuzumi urged him.

"Why?! So that you can come back to fooling around with that smile of yours that's even faker than your boobs and thinking that we're all idiots?"

Reo shook his head, refusing to listen to more. Chihiro knew nothing, nothing! He had no rights to talk to him like that! On the verge of crying, he turned and grabbed the handle. He pulled with so much strength he thought he would have crushed it, thus his surprise was even greater when that slipped from his hands with the door not moving of an inch.

He froze.

Mayuzumi stared at the other trying again and again before realizing that it was locked. As soon as he saw Reo turning again toward him, probably to command him to let him get out, he snapped.

* * *

Mibuchi turned toward the albino, ready to shout at him to let him get out, but he barely managed to half-open his lips before the other's ones fell on them.

The impact crushed his lower lips between his teeth and the other's impetuous face, promising a not really coverable swallow, but the passing of an apologetic tongue made the pain submerge.

Mayuzumi slipped an hand in his hair, challenged the locks to reach his cutis and cup it gently with his finger, then laid the other carefully on his neck, right there were the artery was pulsing and asked for allowance with his tongue tip while with his skin he listened to his beating. It was frantic, wild, but when Chihiro moved his fingers a little, massaging with a light caress, he started slowing down. Following that rhythm, the albino slipped in the dark-haired man's mouth filling it and exploring every corner of it, its softness and warmth, then he backed a bit, but without detaching.

Instead, he teased Reo's tongue to follow his and brought it in his own mouth where he let it full freedom to choose, guide, dominate. He stood submissive, meek, while the other slowly grew confident, sure, bold, and then…

Reo pulled back suddenly.

Mayuzumi simply backed with his face, but did not detached his hands from the other's body as he, panting, stared at him with eyes wide opened. Mibuchi's pulse under his fingers rushed again his rhythm, running scared.

"What…? What…?" Reo was gaping, shocked, "Why?!"

Chihiro raised his eyes to the sky.

"I can assure you a kiss like this has the same meaning between two men as between a man and a woman." he snorted, but his thumb fingertip caressed the other's throat, right there were he could feel the blood rushing, and betrayed a sweet worriedness. The dark haired man blinked and he sighed. "Damn, you're so naïve in these things that I get the urge to hide you somewhere and prevent everybody from getting near you."

Reo kept on staring at the albino with his expression paralyzed in shock.

Of all the possible things, Mayuzumi being interested in _him_ was the most shocking. He had never noticed that kind of interest from his senpai! Sure thing, he was one of those who had acted the most shocked at his choice and with the biggest rage at the discovery of Yoichi's escape, but he had always thought it was a sort of remaining of senpai-instinct, he had never read anything more in it!

Chihiro sighed with a vague irritation, but then made his hand slipped from the other's nape to his neck.

"You're so caught up in your self-despising for this new body that you don't realize how many like you _independently_ from it." he snorted again, bending forward to make their foreheads touch.

"Don't say it…"

"Why?" Mayuzumi replied, like a few before, allowing himself half of a smile for Mibuchi's whining tone, then he brought his hands to his face to dry his cheeks with his thumbs, "It's the truth. You're _beautiful_ , Reo-kun. Man or woman, it makes no difference."

"… _Reo-kun?!_ "

Chihiro detached for a second, staring at the other's dumbfounded expression with a criticizing gaze, then he arched an eyebrow.

"Is this all you get of my speech?" he asked, falsely annoyed.

And Reo tried to hold back, but in front of that offended pout on that usually apathetical face he found himself bursting out laughing, unable to do anything else.

Chihiro stared at him for a moment, but then he smiled a bit, happy to see the other like that, finally cheerful, and pulled the black-head over him, making his face lay on his chest and hugging him tightly.

Reo kept on laughing against Mayuzmi, but not just for him. For a lot of things, for having looked around miles and miles without noticing what he had beside, to having tried to please a man without spotting the phantom at his back ready to catch him if he had fallen, for not having listened to Sei-chan when he was telling him he was as blind in love as him, because _really_ existed someone in that world of intolerant persons who _accepted_ him as he was.

Mayuzumi smiled at him tenderly, over his head.

"I won't treat you like a woman, if you don't want, Reo-kun." he whispered, caressing his hair, "You just have to tell me. We'll find a balance and you'll be fine again, you'll see."

Reo stopped laughing and nodded, but stood against his chest.

"I want you to treat me like a man." he prayed in a low voice, "At least when we're outside the office."

Chihiro nodded, but frowned.

"Not inside?" he asked, "Are you worried about our coworkers?"

Reo shook his head sighing.

"No, it's not them. Sei-chan's father is a determined homophobe and he doesn't know I'm a trans, his son had told him I'm a woman." He shrugged, a bit annoyed and a bit disappointed. "If he knew I had a gender change, he'd fire me. He had already done it with a girl because a rumor said she was lesbian."

"Uh uh…" the grey-head commented, arching his brow again, "I guess he doesn't know his own son is gay, eh?"

"I don't even want to think about it!" Mibuchi muttered, brushing his face against Mayuzumi's chest to sniff his fresh and strong scent, of mint and licorice, "He'd be able to kill him! That man could never accept that… _Oh my God!_ "

Chihiro widened his eyes when Reo suddenly pulled back, grabbing his shoulders with his hands and showing him two big green eyes and an opened mouth.

"What?!" he asked, confused.

"He could never accept it! _This is why!_ " the other exclaimed, ignoring him and putting hands in his hair, his gaze lost on images Chihiro couldn't see, "This is why Kuroko-chan didn't tell him!"

"What are you… _Oh my God!_ " Mayuzumi widened his eyes even more, reaching the other's same conclusion. Did it mean that…?! "But you're taking the piss!" he exclaimed, to someone who couldn't hear him.

"We must tell Sei-chan!" Reo began, "I'm sure that's how it is!"

But Chihiro had already jumped off the car.

 _Damn kohais, not a single time that they talk clearly!_


	6. Chapter V

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

 _ **Chapter V**_

"Are you ready, Akashi?"

Seijuro smiled, but not with a kind or sad smile. He smiled with his victorious smile, like an Emperor ready to crush under his foot whoever dared to cross his path, laughing while earing the cracking sound of bones shuttering into pieces.

"See you later, Mayuzumi. Don't take advantage of Reo while I'm not here."

"Sei-chan!"

But Seijuro had already gotten off of his car and Mibuchi could do nothing but stare at him, from the window of the posterior seat of a car, while he walked head held high toward the Akashi Mansion.

"It will be alright." Mayuzumi reassured him from the driver seat, he too keeping his eyes fixed on the red-head back growing farer, "That midget knows how to play his cards."

Reo simply nodded anxiously.

* * *

Seiji walked home refusing to call anybody to pick him up. Tokyo's streets were strangely warm and welcoming all around, guiding him meekly to a well known destination, reassuring him with light whispers of the wind between the periphery backstreets in the middle of the night and with the scent of the rain fallen on the asphalt since a little bit ago.

He lowered the hood of his sweatshirt when he turned the corner of his block and lifted his eyes on his own two-stories house, still walking slowly. In the higher floor there were lights turned on, proof that at least one of his two uncles was in, but in the lower one only the kitchen window was shining lightly.

In the end, he was back. He had left Kyoto without thinking twice and had run back to his mother as soon as things had turned difficult. He felt like a coward, but clenched his fists in his pockets and kept on. He had nothing along, if not his wallet in the back pocket of his washed-out jeans. The white T-shirt he was wearing was hidden under the black sweatshirt and his feet were into an old pair of gym shoes. His red fringe had been slipped carefully behind his left ear, freeing the cornflower iris.

He reached the entrance gate and opened it, then he raised his head and _finally_ he noticed the figure on the steps.

"Mom?!"

Kuroko was still pale and holding on his shoulder the huge deformed sweater he had used during the pregnancy and that reached now the back of his knees. He had his teal hair ruffled and his eyes tired, but, with his hands clenched together, he sat on the highest of the three steps in front of the entrance door and opened up in a little smile when he saw his son's figure running breathlessly on the alleyway.

"What are you doing out here?!" Seiji exclaimed, reaching him while mentally cursing his stupidity, "It's cold, get in-…!"

He stopped because, as soon as he got in hand-reach, his father stretched out his arms and pulled him to his chest. He was on his feet on the second step by now and, taking advantage of his being taller than his son, he encircled his shoulders with an arm and with the other and he made the boy hide the face in his chest. Seiji blinked for a moment, confused, but then gave up in that embrace and brought his hands to his mother's back.

"It's no good at all when it's the son who takes care of his father, especially if he is the one who's not okay." Tetsuya pulled back a bit to observe his kid's face with a sad smile, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Seiji immediately shook his head and came back to childishly bury his face in his father's chest.

"I don't need it." he whispered, tightening the hug and forcing himself to believe those words chasing away from his mind the picture of Akashi's apathetical and disinterested face, "As long as I have you, I don't need anything else." He turned his head to a side, laying his ear against Tetsuya's breastbone, and closed his eyes to concentrate for a moment, in silence, on the slow comforting beating of that frail heart. "Thus, please," he swallowed the weight growing in his throat, "don't leave me, mom."

Kuroko smiled and slowly, carefully, he began stroking his red hair, exactly like a mother, well aware that just a few things in the world reassured Seiji as feeling his hands between the strands.

"Shhh…" he whispered when he felt the sweater on his chest turning moist and dump and his son's body began trembling, shook by difficultly misleading jerks, "It's alright, Seiji. I'm not going anywhere."

* * *

When the morning light entered the living-room window and laid on the entangled bodies of father and son, it didn't wake anyone. The phone ringing, instead, fully accomplished that goal.

Seiji jerked, confused, and looked around just to find himself on the couch – the TV still on despite the videotape of his father's high school basketball matches already finished – between his dad and the edge, while the other man on his side, smashed between him and the backrest and was muttering under his breath some incoherent threats to whoever was calling.

"Shall I answer?" the red-head offered brushing his teal eye with an hand, but his father shook his head, worsening even more his wild bed-head.

"If it's one of your uncles and discovers you're here, we'll have them all here without failing and I'd like to avoid breaking my promise to you by ending up in prison for homicide."

Seiji laughed with himself for his father's acidity of the early-morning, but sat up and helped him to do the same, then Kuroko, always muttering, reached for the sadly abandoned on the floor cordless. With a snort he brought it to his ear, but then his voice sounded apathetical and unreadable like always.

"Moshi moshi?"

" _KUROKOCCHI, THE NEWS!_ " Kuroko frowned when Kise's voice flew in his ears in an unbearable volume, but the blonde man kept on talking, " _TURN THE TV ON, NOW! WATCH THE NEWS!_ "

"Don't shout, Kise-kun, you're damaging my eardrums." he ordered, taking up defeated even the remote control because conscious that Kise would have not left him alone 'til when he had accomplished his umpteenth whimper. "What channel?"

" _ANYONE!_ "

Tetsuya sighed under Seiji's curious gaze, but pressed the digit for a news channel and waited a second for the screen to switch from the trembling blackness of the ended videotape to…

The cordless slipped out of his hand and fell to the ground, filling the room with Kise's loud and frantic voice as if it was just a whisper, easily covered by the conceited voice of the journalist hurrying up in sharing the most contended news of the day: **the _disowning_ of the economy genius Akashi Seijuro**.

"What the heck…?!" Seiji tried to say, his eyes widened like his father's, but he interrupted himself when it was opened a connection with what looked like a press conference led by no one but Akashi Seito in person.

The tall and austere man, with black hair and small cold eyes behind squandered glasses, sat straight and impassive in his elegant suit in front of microphones and cameras, apparently unfazed by the whole situation.

" _Seijuro's behaviour_ " he was saying, " _has been unacceptable for far too long. I had wanted to turn a blind eye and tolerate it because he was my son, but to me is no longer possible to do the same due to some recent happenings. Seijuro has been removed from all his offices and…_ "

Kuroko stopped really listening after the first sentence.

Akashi…disowned?! It was not possible, it couldn't be! Why?! What happened?!

"What…What does this mean?" Seiji suddenly whispered, lifting a confused gaze on his father, but Kuroko couldn't find anything to answer him.

They stood motionless, silent with their eyes on the TV screen, until when Midorima and Takao practically broke in their house.

* * *

Tetsuya moved a bit the white curtain of the kitchen window, the with the view of the backyard, and took a moment for himself to observe Seiji playing with Number Three, the five-years old husky puppy, son of Nigou and only dog in the house since fourteen months, when his dad had died, calmly and during sleep, of age.

Dog and boy were sitting on the grass and pulling the two sides of the same piece of rope, in a ridicule tug of war under Kazunari's attentive eyes, while Midorima had gone at the hospital because of an emergency. Kuroko had said he didn't feel very well, blaming his recent heart attack, and had been put to rest on the couch while all the others got out of the house to leave him in peace.

He was sure even Seiji was as restless as him for what had happened that morning, but the boy looked determined to pretend he didn't care, maybe not to worry him any further, and Tetsuya _knew_ that in the end, that time, it was his turn to step forward.

He observed the teenager still for a bit, dubious, but in the end he pressed the dialling button on the phone he had in hand since fifteen minutes straight and brought it to his ear with a heavy sigh.

It didn't make more than a single ring before a well-known voice, warm and deep as refreshing and pleasant, answered.

" _Tetsuya._ " Not a greeting nor hesitation, his first name slipped down the teal-head's back making him shiver.

"…Akashi-kun." he sighed, closing his eyes. He felt already tired and he wasn't sure he had the strength to resist the battle Seijuro would have surely forced him to engage. He immediately regretted his choice, but by then he had to keep on. "What are you doing?"

" _I don't know what you're talking about._ " Seijuro commented calmly and Kuroko almost, _almost_ , believed him.

"I'm not an eremite, Akashi-kun." he answered, serious, "I have a TV and watch the news."

" _Oh, that._ " the other minimized, " _My dad put on a good show, didn't he? I still have to get the pleasure of seeing his interview, but Reo assured me that he played all his best cards._ "

Tetsuya hesitated.

So it was true, Akashi hadn't seen the news yet, but he knew that the interview had been shared with the public and yet he seemed so…calm. Almost arrogant in his satisfied and indifferent to his father's attacks voice.

"Why…" he hesitated again – did he really have any right to ask? – but he had already called him and the terror of that all being _his fault_ was stronger than his politeness and brought him to murmur, "Why did he disown you?"

" _For something he should have disowned me for almost sixteen years ago, probably even before from his point of view, but I believe throwing out a thirteen-year-old boy could have been too much even for him._ " was the calm and immediate answer of the red-head.

Kuroko didn't really need much time to understand what he was hinting to, but that didn't make him feel better. In the end, it _really_ was his fault.

"I told you…"

" _And I ignored you._ " Akashi interrupted him effortlessly, in that arrogant yet elegant way of his, above the whole rest of the world, " _Now, Tetsuya, do you know what I'm doing?_ "

"…You're acting like an idiot and ruining your life?"

" _Very funny._ " It didn't look like he thought it for real. " _Instead, I'm driving._ "

Kuroko barely refrained from frowning in confusion.

"Driving?" he asked, failing in catching the link between that answer and the main topic of the conversation.

" _To Tokyo._ "

"What?!"

Seiji lifted his eyes, surprised, hearing his mother's voice going up, but Tetsuya shook his head from behind the window, letting him know he had nothing to worry about, and so he came back to playing with his dog, only useful remedy for the chaos in his mind.

" _I'm almost there._ " Akashi kept on, unaware of the situation, but his voice turn more serious, " _We need to talk and you'd better quit with your annoying lies or else there will be consequences to face. Did I make myself clear?_ "

"Akashi-kun…"

" _See you later, Tetsuya._ "

"Wait, Akashi-kun!"

The rhythmical 'bip-bip-bip' of the interrupted call echoed in his ears for some seconds before he found the courage to hang up. His eyes focused again on Seiji.

Even after so many years without seeing Seijuro, Kuroko knew there were troubles coming.

* * *

When he heard the doorbell rang, Kuroko _knew_ it was Akashi so he went to it with a slow defeated pace, not at all enthusiast for the upcoming talk. With an hand on the handle, he thought for a moment about pretending he wasn't at home: Midorima was still at the hospital, Takao had brought Seiji away with an excuse as soon as Tecchan had told him Akashi was coming and Kise and Aomine had been warned to stay away for a while and they would have worked as obstacles in case Seijuro would have remained longer than expected and it would have been necessary to keep the younger Kuroko out of sight for a while more; nobody would have let the red-head in and he would have been forced to leave, wouldn't him?

"I know you're behind the door, Tetsuya. Do not oblige me to climb up the roses arbour, I'm not sixteen anymore."

With a defeated sigh, Kuroko opened the door.

In front of him, shiny in his jeans and white shirt and _that damn leather jacket_ that had been Tetsuya's last present – and was by then definitely worn out – and that the teal-head was starting to believe it carried misfortune, was a smirking Akashi Seijuro with hands in his pockets and the body's weight balance on a single leg. Such mesmerizing creature arched an eyebrow.

"You didn't think about pretending not to be at home, I hope." he commented and Kuroko wondered when ever his power of reading minds would worn out.

"You know I don't give up until the very end, Akashi-kun." he simply replied apathetically, but in the meanwhile he moved to a side to let the other in, and the red-head politely took off his shoes before glancing around.

"Some things have changed since last time I've been here…" he absentmindedly commented.

Kuroko was confused by such a calm behaviour, but his mind decided that playing along was better than initiating the conversation the other was in his living room for.

"My parents moved overseas and Midorima-kun and Takao-kun came to live in the higher floor." he explained, "We had to readjust everything a bit."

Akashi nodded, recognizing the situation Shintarou had talked to him about, and calmly approached the living room bookshelf, behind the couch, to observe the pictures showing themselves in a line in the central shelf. Tetsuya stood there watching him, not allowing any of his emotion to lay on his face, but his heart clenched a bit when the other took carefully one of the photos, the first of the line, and opened up in a little smile.

"The day he was born?" Seijuro hazarded, his eyes fixed on the picture of a young Kuroko – barely nineteen – in a hospital gown, sitting on a rigid bed surrounded by white, carrying in his arms a minuscule child, all reddened. Judging by his expression and the opening of his mouth, he was surely crying with all his might.

"Some weeks after." Kuroko corrected, but he too looked at the image, "He had to stay in incubator for a while before I could carry him for the first time. He was born of eight months."

Akashi seemed to absorb those words one by one, like a sponge, but never averted his gaze.

"You look happy." he declared after a second.

"I was." the teal-head assured, with not a single hesitation, "I still am."

"Then why did you think I wouldn't have been?"

Kuroko stiffened.

In the end the moment had come, the discussion he wished he could avoid forever, but when Seijuro lifted his red eyes on him and put back the picture he knew that time he wouldn't have been allowed to postpone.

Surprisingly enough, though, Akashi didn't wait for his answer.

"But that wasn't the only reason, was it?" he cornered him, but in a low voice, not aggressively, with in the eyes all the calmness and resignation of someone who had _understood_ and wasn't holding a grudge despite everything, "You were scared of my father. You knew how he was and that he wouldn't have accepted such a thing, that he could have done everything, and thus you chose to leave and keep the secret because you thought it was the best for the all of us; for me, for you and most of all for the baby. Am I wrong?"

Tetsuya tried to hold Akashi's gaze, he tried long and for some minutes he managed to, but then the silence and those words and that morning news in his head lowered his eyelids and head.

"It useless, after all." he murmured, "Nothing changed."

"It changed a lot, instead." Seijuro shook his head, this time turning openly toward him, "It changed that you managed to have our son and raise him into a wonderful young man. With my father after us, it wouldn't have been this 'easy'."

Kuroko frowned at those words and almost without realizing he lifted his head, looking for Akashi's expression to read there an emotion to give them sense, but what he found was a _too close_ Seijuro.

The red-head was less than a step from him and Tetsuya tried to step back, but the other moved and forced him to get trapped with his shoulders against the wall. On his face a serious expression, Akashi stared at him straight in the eyes, from the high of those seven centimetres more of him.

"I told my father I have an illegitimate son with another man, that casually turned out able to bear children." he calmly said, but non for this uncaring, "And that I regretted nothing but not having been there with them in those passed fifteen years. Now, I'm telling _you_ the same." A little smirk surfaced on his lips, breaking the moment, "However, I have the intention of changing something, in this all."

Tetsuya felt his heart fastening his beating dangerously when Seijuro got even nearer and instinctively he put the hands on the other's chest, trying to shove him away, but only ending up feeling, under the subtle cloth of the shirt, the warmth and strength of his body and his steady healthy heartbeat, regular.

"Akashi-kun…" _Bad mistake, very bad._

"First of all," the red one preceded him, reaching the point of putting the index on his lips to shut him up, while posing the other hand on the wall near the teal-head's side and balancing on it most of his weight, "I told Reo to get me the documents to acknowledge Seiji as mine within tomorrow morning. Obviously I'll talk to him about it and, if he prefers, we'll wait to officialise them, but still I'll have them with me." Closer, a bit more, and their nose tips touched. "Second step, the first moment possible we'll take a flight – you, Seiji and I – and we'll go to that damn gay church in America, the one where we wanted to get married when we were supposed to go to college together, and _finally_ I'll make you my wife so I'll be sure you won't try to run from me again like you had fun doing up until now." Akashi's hand that was previously gagging Kuroko's mouth slipped away, removing the last obstacle between their faces, to lay possessively on the teal-head's side, "As a third point, we'll come back home and leave Seiji with Shintarou for a night and you know what that means. In the end, fourth place, the following morning the three of us will go somewhere, alone, away from everybody and everything, and we'll spend the whole day together with you and Seiji telling me everything I missed in all this time." A sudden malicious grin bloomed on the red-head's face. "It goes without saying, if you'll be able to walk, otherwise we'll have to stay home watching the old family albums."

Tetsuya felt tears in his eyes, but despite all the years as a shadow he couldn't remember how to hide them. The images Seijuro had carefully painted in his mind, like the most refined artist, were mesmerizing and bewitching, tempting in their warm and intimate simplicity, in the meek joy they were promising, but he was hesitant in conceding himself to them and to the man that was fighting for him with such a strong will. In his mind, the old fears were hard to die.

"And…" His voice cracked, he gulped and kept on trembling but he faked indifference, "…your father?"

Akashi surprised him by rolling his eyes.

"I don't have a father anymore, Tetsuya, you saw it." he answer, again…devilishly satisfied, the phantom would have said. A Cheshire Cat pleased with himself. "And even if I had, I deem my paternity far more important than his." Discarded the smile, up a serious gaze, but Seijuro didn't step back and his hand on the phantom's side stood firm and warm, reassuring. Closing his eyes, the taller man laid his forehead on his partner's, and he could do nothing but whimpering something and lowering his eyelids too letting himself being lulled away by the other's voice. "Tetsuya," the red-head said, almost melancholic, "I now first hand how much it hurts to see your father choosing the family name over his own son. And I _refuse_ of doing the same." Kuroko opened his eyes, surprised buy that sudden revealed 'weakness', just to see Akashi doing the same at the same moment. They both smiled a little at that synchrony. "I even refuse" Seijuro murmured, moving his hand from the wall to Tetsuya's cheek, "to leave _you_ again. The other 'me' did it and ended up crushed by it, I repeated his mistake and spent sixteen years missing you: I won't let it happen a third time."

Kuroko gulped. What could he do? In front of all those words, in front of that love, what did he have left? What could he say more?

"I'm sorry…" slipped out of his lips, like a tear of air and voice, as soon as his mind elaborated those questions, "What I told you last time, I have never, _ever_ , not even once, though it for real. I know who _you_ are, I trust the person you are, and I'd bet my life that you'd never hurt me or Seiji."

Akashi smiled more, brighter, and nodded even if still with his forehead against the phantom's one.

"I know." he reassured the other, knowing he was on the verge of crying, and slowly caressed his cheek, "But, please, _stop_ trying to protect me from my father. He's nothing to me, if compared to how much I love you and Seiji."

Kuroko shook his head a bit, but without really finding the will to pull out from Akashi's forehead and hands.

"But…what will you do now?" he questioned, still hesitant after so much.

Seijuro giggled a bit, of a joke only he could understand.

"In the near future, I'll take care of my own company, that for your information is running since five years already, blooming and absolutely free from any tie with my father; then, as soon as I'll have to famous papers signed, I'll release an interview to tell the whole world I'm a gay who's happily married with an hermaphrodite and a proud father of his splendid _legitimate_ son."

"What?!"

"In this very moment, instead, I'm simply kissing you."

"Akashi-kun, wai-…!"

But before Kuroko's words, came Akashi's tongue. Between his half-opened lips, he slipped in the cave of the other's mouth and began tasting it carefully, exploring it voraciously, re-discovering every millimetre that he had already claimed as his and his alone in the past and that had stood his even in those years.

Tetsuya wanted to deny him, to find the logic he had lost, think seriously to all the difficulties that disaster would have created more, but instead he hatched even more, like a flower, opening his arms to envelope the red-haired man, spreading a bit his legs to let him put a knee between them, bending a bit his head to a side to grant him a better access.

That kiss, oh, that kiss, he could have recognize it between milliards. It was Akashi, only Akashi could do it like that, as if he was commanding and worshipping at the same time, making him feel like an obedient tin soldier and the most beautiful creature of the existent, never exaggerating and never demanding for too much, never overbearing and never sickly sweet. Hot like Hell and welcoming as Heaven.

The joy was so strong in him that in the end it broke his little resistance letting the tears falling from his eyes to his cheeks. It was all so perfect…

Akashi's pulled away from his all of a sudden, but it did it forcefully, as if it had been ripped away, and Kuroko opened his eyes, shocked, when he heard Seijuro lamenting weakly.

On his feet between him and the red-head, in a defensive pose, ready to protect his mother, Seiji glared furiously to the father he had just punched in the face.

"Who the bloody fuck do you think you are?!" he yelled at him, raging, and before Kuroko could stop him, as soon as Akashi turned his face toward him with an hand on his swollen cheek, the guy threw himself again at his father, trying to hit him a second time.

"Stop it, Seiji!" Tetsuya screamed, shocked, but the older red-head grabbed masterfully the boy by his wrists and then shot the teal-head a look telling him to let him do.

"You're a sick bastard! Get out of here!" Seiji was screaming, struggling with the same effort he had used to ran from Rakuzan's teachers, and Seijuro let him do, ignoring all the insults, 'til when he managed to let the wrists go to grab the shoulders.

While the boy was still cursing and trying to hit him, Akashi held him to his chest, blocking his body with an arm and instinctively laying the other hand like a cup on his nape, caressing him slowly.

Tetsuya felt a strange shiver at the idea that Seijuro, without knowing, had just found out his son's weak spot.

That same son who was still hitting him with weaker and weaker fists, as trembling badly-hidden sobs slowly broke the insults.

"…Y-You're a bastard…" Seiji whispered in the end, but this time his hands clenched on the shirt cloth, as if trying to prevent the man from leaving again, "I…I hate you…"

"I know. I know." Seijuro reassured him, almost without caring of those words, just holding him trying to keep in mind all the times when, he knew, an hug from his father would have been enough to free him from his hell, "I'm here exactly to make you change your mind."

Seiji brushed the face against his chest, as he had done the evening before with Tetsuya, and looked for his smell like a puppy, but didn't stop crying.

"…I hate this ego of yours…" he muttered all the same.

Tetsuya giggled, in tears he too, while observing that scene and Akashi smiled at him and stretched an arm for him to join the hug. The teal-head embraced his son and held tightly on the partner, looking for the warmth of both, and Akashi tightened his held on them.

"I'm scared this is something that can't be helped." he pretended to deny.

Seiji sniffed.

"You're lucky mom taught me not to be capricious." he retorted, sagacious despite his hoarse voice.

Akashi laughed, shooting a glance at Kuroko.

"Well, we should really reward her for this, then." he commented, then he looked for Seiji's face to meet his eyes and smile to him, "What about cooking lunch for him?"

"Akashi-kun, you can't cook." Kuroko butted in, fearing in spite of himself for his kitchen.

Seijuro proudly lifted his chin to hi s partner.

"But the shop at the corner of the street can." he replied, as if it was a great merit of him, and the youngest one detached a bit from him, still keeping the hug with an arm to dry his face with the other.

"They even have milk-shakes…" he added, to mock a bit Tetsuya and trying to convince him to accept that proposition.

Akashi rolled his eyes.

"Vanilla?" he tried to guess, the irritation against that flavour clear in his voice.

Seiji answered with a disgusted face.

"Puah! Chocolate!" he corrected, shaking his head, "Only mom eats that thing!"

"This is my son."

Kuroko snorted at that sudden camaraderie against his favourite drink.

"Why don't you go buying lunch _for you two_ and eat it on the porch? Because I'm locking you both outside."

Seijuro smirked. All of a sudden he pulled Tetsuya closer and juxtaposed the lips to his ear, maliciously.

"Careful not to tempt me." he whispered invitingly, "I'm already thinking far too much at how to lock _you_ somewhere…"

"SEIJURO!" Tetsuya immediately exclaimed, using every ounce of his self-control not to blush furiously in front of his son, betraying the dirty things his father had just told him.

Seiji arched a brow, but instead that toward the teal-head he turned toward the red one.

"Should I get used to hear mom calling you by your first name?" he asked.

Akashi smiled lovingly.

"I'd rather you to get used to call me 'dad'." he replied ruffling the younger's hair with a laughter.

* * *

First of all. Second step. Third point. Fouth place.

In how little time Akashi kept all the promises he had made Tetsuya in that faithful day.

* * *

A red-haired boy with heterochromatic eyes, a scarlet and a turquoise one, smiled and at his first day in his knew school, the Seirin High School in Tokyo, lifted his chin proudly while introducing himself as _Akashi_ Seiji.

* * *

 **Authoress' notes:**

 _This is ALMOST it! See it?! I CAN give you happy Papa Sei-kun, it's just that usually don't want to v.v *runs away from pineapples*_

 _Okay, I don't want to say much to keep it for next week, but... Thank You._

 _Also, I'm posting a little KnB One-Shot (up to Alternative Ending) called "The peaceful dream of a Ghost and Lady Death". If you want to check it ;)_

 _As always, find me on tumblr as agapantoblu . tumblr . com_

 _See you! :D_

 ** _Agap_**


	7. Epilogue

_**ARE YOU READY?**_

 _ **Epilogue**_

 _Are you ready? This is the moment of truth._

Akashi Seiji was eighteen, red-haired, heterochromatic eyed – a scarlet and a cornflower orbs – and had two fathers when he opened the letter from the Medicine Faculty of the Tokyo University and discovered he'd been accepted.

He read greedily every single word, absorbed hours and professors' names he had already heard of, then waited for a moment more, for pure sadism, mentally smirking while feeling the gaze fixed on his back.

* * *

"Ohi, don't push, Kise!"

"Then?! Then?! Can you see him in face, Aominecchi?! Was he accepted?!"

"How the fuck should I know?!"

"Even if he saw him, he wouldn't understand all the same, nanodayo."

"Seiji-chin is like Kuro-chin, but I don't want to crush him."

"Kuroko-kun would crush you if you only ever tried, Atsushi."

"Well said, bro. Ohi, don't pus-…Ugh!"

"Bakagami, out of my way! I'll use Takao's Hawk Eye to read what's written on the letter!"

"Eh?! Wait, it doesn't work like that!"

"Hyuuga, you're killing him."

"Kiyoshi-san, it's better if you let him pass. I have enough data about him to know he would gladly kill you, in this moment."

"Don't encourage him, Momoi!"

" _Come on_ , chill off, Riko-chan! _You're not cute at all when you get angry!_ "

"Boys, listen to Alex-san and let Reo-nee pass!"

"Your hypocrisy surprises me every time, 'love'."

And while Kagami, Aomine and Kise pushed each other, while Hyuuga tried to pull by his neck Takao toward the glass and Teppei tried to stop him, while Momoi and Riko quarrelled and Alex tried to calm them, while Himuro and Murasakibara talked with each other and Reo and Chihiro kept on their bantering and Midorima stood against the wall, all spying – someone openly and someone faking disinterest – in a very poorly discrete way from behind the curtain of the living room window – the only one eyeing the letter box –, Kuroko sighed desolated.

A little giggle reached him with the arm circling his shoulders.

When he lifted his eyes on him, Seijuro smiled.

They were both sitting on the couch, observing the show of their idiotic friend – and self-proclaimed uncles of the object of such attention –, and they both looked calm, collected, in contrast with all the others. Kuroko spied on his husband, elegant with his suit trousers and white shirt still on from work, and between himself he felt surprised for the umpteenth time, so he lowered his eyes on the wedding ring on his left hand.

Akashi noticed his gaze and smiled, tender. Tetsuya seemed always amazed by that ring, the proof of their marriage, and it was understandable, but to him it was only one of the many miracles he felt like worshipping every time he posed his gaze on the minute figure of his husband.

He lowered his eyes on his lover's chest. He couldn't see it, but he _knew_ it was there: Kuroko's new heart, result of a six-hours surgery of a year and a half before, was a hidden and silent wonder, but thankfully strong and efficient.

He lowered his eyes a bit more. _That_ was instead a wonder that was kind of impossible _not_ to notice.

Careful, Seijuro stretched his hand to caress his husband's round and full belly and touched it slowly since when he felt a movement of the baby inside it, almost on the left side of the teal-head.

Kuroko immediately lifted his eyes on him.

"Did you hear?" he slowly asked, but with a living and amazed sparkle in his eyes.

Akashi smiled and nodded.

"He's saying that his uncles are imbeciles." he declared, stealing a kiss from the shorter one's lips, "His big brother has _obviously_ being accepted."

" _Obviously._ " Kuroko repeated, rolling his eyes but opening in a little smile, "After all, he's your son."

"Precisely. He's _absolute_ like me."

Tetsuya shook his head, sighing again, but after all amazed by the red-head's arrogance.

The following day, he would be admitted to the hospital and subjected to a programmed caesarean cut to give birth without risks to his second son, Akashi Tetsuhiko, - the repeating of the miraculous conception didn't grant the repeating even of the miracle of both father's and son's survival without adequate treatments, Midorima had said grumbling – but for that moment at least he would concentrate only on Seiji and would keep him the closest possible before the birth of his younger brother and his leaving for the University would brought him away from them sensibly. He would even move, saying he was ready to live on his own and forcing him to admit that a house with a just born child would be far too noisy to allow him to study.

"It will be okay." Kuroko jerked, surprised, and moved his eyes back on Akashi, but he kept on smiling to him as if he had read his thoughts perfectly, "Seiji is smart, he'll be fine in his own. You have to worry for Tetsuhiko, who'll have all this folk around for the next eighteen years of his life at best."

Tetsuya smiled at those words, laid against his husband's side posing the head on his shoulder and sighing meekly in his body's warmth, but didn't answer. He would take the right to worry for a bit more, independently from what Seijuro said.

Seiji entered the main door in that moment and stood on the living room entrance. He took pleasure for a bit more in the sufferance and restless faces of his uncles and only when Kise was on the verge of death he opened in a victorious smile and lifted his admission letter to the sky as a sign of triumph.

Then, he was run over by a mass of bodies.

The chorus of two sighs was covered by the enthusiastic voiced of that folk.

"Seijuro?"

"Yes?"

"Could you please gently go to save our son?"

Akashi laughed a bit, but got up and reached for the crowd of uncles around the celebrated man, risking suffocating or stamping on him probably. Tetsuya observed him with a smile, then passed a hand over his belly in a light but loving caress.

"Don't worry, Tetsuhiko." he murmured slowly, paying attention not to be heard, "Even if they're all a bit crazy, you're going to born in a marvellous family."

Tetsuhiko kicked delicately his mother and Tetsuya smiled deciphering that answer.

 _I know._ , it said, _I'm ready._

 _THE END_

* * *

 _Okay, well, we're at the end, aren't we? :)_

 _DID YOU SEE THEM?! Happy Papa-Sei-kun, Happy Mama-Tecchan; Happy Seiji-nii and probably future Happy Tetsuhiko-chan! Now I want my bear-hugs and all the love you promised me! v.v_

 _A part from jokes, here's a little serious thing. I've never, ever, written M-Preg or GenderBender. This was my first time and it made me a bit worried because I wasn't sure how to write it without being stupid or disrespectful. If, despite my effort to avoid it, I've been one of these two, then I'm sorry and I apologize._

 _That said, what I wanted to communicate was: DON'T make your choice based on what OTHERS want/ask from you. Nobody, be it your father or your lover or whoever you want, has the right to choose for you. If you want to attend that school, do it even if nobody you know will do the same; if you want to love someone, do it and don't listen to what people say (that person excluded, obviously ^^"); and if you want to take a Gender-Change Surgery or every other kind of aesthetic surgery, than do it, it's your body, you have the right to do whatever you want with it as long as it is for YOU to feel BETTER. Just, DON'T DO IT FOR SOMEONE ELSE._

 _Okay, seriousness exhausted, let's come back to idiocy._

 _If you want to check them, on Tumblr **emimiyako** and **signedsfs** had drawn some beautiful images of Seiji. Oh, and -always on tumblr " agapantoblu . tumblr . com "- my Ask-Box will be opened from the 3rd of July, okay? :)_

 _Well then, see you!_

 ** _Agap_**


End file.
